Dense and dark, the three parts contract in cast and duration and attachment to reality. The largest first section is of unrealized sexual obsession, the second with land obsession and the last is a purified obsession of unsupported aspiration with nothing to aspire to. All set in a poisonous landscape of reflexive racism, lethal violence, and squandered resources. ( )

The three novellas in this book look at Haitian families of different social standings. Each novella evokes the emotions of its title. Vieux-Chauvet does a fabulous job of creating the emotions, and the reader can feel what each character feels. Love, Anger, Madness.

Love looks at the three adult daughters who live in their late parents' large stately home. Claire, the oldest, is the darkest (darker than either parent) and is an old maid and the housekeeper/house manager. She has never managed to marry, due to her dark skin and her own complex about her dark skin. Felicia, the middle sister, is blonde and married to Jean Luze. Claire is desperately in love with her brother-in-law, who has eyes for his other sister-in-law. Annette, the youngest, is fair with dark hair. She is 22 and has a serious marriage prospect. The story recounts these goings on in their home, as well as the violence in their neighborhood, with the Commandant Calédu's attacks on the bourgoise people of the town. The beggars are his army, such as it is.

Anger looks at a family who's great-grandfather worked hard in a small time and managed to legally buy and certify land and a home in Port-au-Prince. The land has now been seized by soldiers. His grandson will do anything to save it, but the great-granddaughter Rose knows she is the only one who can, through the sacrifice of her virtue and future. The ending was clear but also confusing.

Madness looks at some of the beggar class--the poor, dark men. This group consists of 3 beggar-poets, all poor and dark, and 1 French world war veteran who fled France after the war. They drink too much and eat too little. René seems to be their leader--a mulatto son of a late black single woman who carefully served her loas, he fits in no society and has abandoned all religion. He thinks the town is being attacked and has been hiding with Jacques and André, and then also Simon. His delusions will get him into trouble in the end. IS he truly mad, or is this alcohol-induced? ( )

The triptych Amour, Colère et Folie is a merciless attack on Haitian society in the second half of the 20th century: amongst other things, Vieux-Chauvet exposes the damaging effects of a long tradition of racism and class-prejudice, the competing demands of two rapacious and terminally-conservative religious traditions (Voudou and Roman Catholicism) and the economic disaster resulting from a succession of corrupt governments selling off whatever they could to the USA. All this has left the Haitian people collectively too cowardly to stand up to state terrorism.

Duvalier is never actually mentioned, and in fact one of the three stories is ostensibly set long before he came to power, whilst the two others describe fictional political movements whose iconography has more to do with Nazi Germany than with Haiti, but in all three cases it's clear that the crimes they commit are exactly those most associated with the Tontons Macoutes. Duvalier got the message, anyway: he was apparently so furious about the book that Vieux-Chauvet had to flee the country whilst her family bought up and suppressed all remaining copies of the original 1968 edition (it wasn't republished until 2005, long after her death).

The three stories don't form a linked narrative: each has a different location and set of characters, and there isn't even any obvious time-sequence. But they have very strong thematic links: each is about a group of characters literally or metaphorically trapped in a house by the threat of political terror. They draw strongly on mainstream European literary traditions with all the descriptions of bourgeois neighbours spying on each other from behind their shutters and evaluating microscopic differences in social status. (There's also clearly a Chekhov thing going on: in each story the main peripheral character is a doctor, the first story is about three provincial sisters, the second about a family trying to avoid the confiscation of an orchard, ...)

All this comfortable middle-classness is set against a jarringly-different external world, where people are being arbitrarily arrested to be beaten, tortured and sexually assaulted in jail; where the beggars carry guns and spy for the police; where the police or paramilitaries shoot people apparently at random during festivals or on park benches; where a poet is ipso facto a political criminal; and where the reality is always decidedly worse than the nightmare. Emma as directed by Quentin Tarantino.

It's all very strange and quite disturbing, and obviously in many ways specific to the time and place where it was written, especially because of the dominant role of the mulatto landowning class in post-revolutionary Haiti, which led to the obsessive attention to precise degrees of ancestry and shades of skin-colour that Vieux-Chauvet describes. But it's still very much worth reading for what it tells us about the ways in which bullies and sadists get into power by exploiting existing weaknesses in the societies where they find themselves. ( )

Released in the wake of the 2010 quake in Haiti, this translation of Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Love, Anger, Madness is nothing short of spectacular. The translation is excellent, and the images within are some of the most vibrant and difficult I've ever encountered. ( )