★ 03/02/2020
Orphaned gang members and desperate refugees live on a machete’s edge in Appanah’s blistering depiction (after Waiting for Tomorrow) of postcolonial chaos in Mayotte, an island in the Mozambique channel. A carousel of first-person narrators recount the abrupt life story of Möise, abandoned as a baby and taken in by Marie, a white nurse in Mayotte. After Marie dies, the teenage Möise’s simmering identity crisis leads him into the island’s unforgiving slum, a “violent no-man’s land” called Gaza. There, the book-loving Möise, who names his dog after the author Henri Bosco, falls sway to gang leader Bruce, whose child soldiers run Gaza’s economy by drug dealing, burglary, and political graft. Marked as a middle-class interloper, Möise is ripe for Bruce’s exploitation. The calamitous chain of events that follows is narrated from beyond the grave by players who are helpless to change it and can only affirm its inevitability. “This country turns us all into beings who do wrong,” Marie says in her ghostly narration. A journalist and native Mauritian, Appanah has a knack for reportorial detail that crystallizes the characters’ commentary. Seen from above, present-day Mayotte is adrift in its own history, neglected by France, its parent state; at ground level it’s bloodstained and redolent with “sour urine on street corners, ancient shit in the gutters, chicken being grilled on top of oil drums, eau de cologne and spices outside the houses, the sour sweat of men and women and musty reek of laundry.” Appanah skillfully lets these perspectives merge in the short, brutal lives of her characters. This heralds Appanah as an essential cosmopolitan voice. (May)
In Appanah’s sobering story, a baby boy, Moïse, abandoned by his migrant mother, is adopted by a nurse, grows into a rebellious adolescent, and becomes entangled with a sadistic teen-age gang leader. Appanah offers a portrait of a place both beautiful and brutal, suggesting that Mayotte, damaged by colonization, corruption, poverty, and neglect, is fated to afflict its inhabitants in turn.”—The New Yorker
“Sharp and unforgettable, this powerful story illuminates the global refugee crisis and its devastating consequences.”—Ms. Magazine
“A dazzling glass mosaic reflecting still-colonial France whose shards are edged with blood. . . . Appanah’s prose is filled with Morrison-esque lyricism, multi-generational narrative, and cutting tragedy. . . . Reading of these lives is like wading in the warm waters of a mile-high cataract. There’s pleasure in every sustained moment, but you find yourself urgently attuned to the fate of a place whose pristine allure is thanks only to neglect.”—The Arkansas International
“[Tropic of Violence] reads with the intimacy of a diary or the directness of testimony, which in the depictions of abject poverty and violence in Mayotte aid in the critique of French colonialism and the failures of postcolonial and humanitarian projects.”—Reading in Translation
“Searing, lyrical, and ultimately devastating, Appanah’s latest novel might be her finest yet.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“A journalist and native Mauritian, Appanah has a knack for reportorial detail that crystallizes the characters’ commentary. . . . [Tropic of Violence] heralds Appanah as an essential cosmopolitan voice.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“How can a story so harrowing, so wrenching be so gorgeous? . . . Surreally relevant, [Tropic of Violence] proves revelatory."—Booklist, starred review
“Appanah’s heartrending, insightful story makes us understand—and feel—the steps leading toward bloody confrontation in this relentless world.”—Library Journal, starred review
“Spellbinding. . . . By deploying . . . varied perspectives, as well as intensely vivid language to capture the reader's imagination, Appanah renders emotionally accessible a life experience most of us will never fully comprehend.”—Shelf Awareness, starred review
★ 04/01/2020
After two recent stunners, The Last Brother and Waiting for Tomorrow, the Mauritian-born, French-based Appanah returns to cement her reputation as a leading world writer. The setting is Mayotte, an island in the Mozambique Channel (and a départment of France) suffering from the poverty and violence that seem inevitably a legacy of postcolonialism. Outspoken nurse Marie, separated from her husband and desperate for a child, accepts a baby with bicolored eyes shoved at her by a superstitious refugee. She names him Moïse and raises him lovingly but dies when he is a teenager, her spirit remaining to help narrate the tragedy that unfolds in this multivoiced work. Joined by his beloved dog, the gentle Moïse ends up in a corrosively ugly slum called Gaza with a children's gang led by the cruel and bullying Bruce. VERDICT Appanah's heartrending, insightful story makes us understand—and feel—the steps leading toward bloody confrontation in this relentless world.
★ 2020-02-10
A teenage boy navigates a life of poverty and brutality on the island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean.
Moïse is barely 14 when his adoptive mother, Marie, suddenly dies. They live on the tropical island of Mayotte, officially a “department” of France. Every year, scores of undocumented immigrants—from the Comoro Islands, Africa, and elsewhere—wash up on Mayotte’s shores in small boats known as kwassa-kwassas. That’s how Moïse’s birth mother arrived. One night, she appeared in the hospital where Marie worked as a nurse, handed over her baby, and disappeared. In her latest novel, Appanah (Waiting for Tomorrow, 2018, etc.) interrogates difficult truths about immigration, class, poverty, and race and doesn’t settle for any easy answers. After Marie dies, Moïse falls from a middle-class life to one of desperation. He turns to a local shantytown and a brutal gang leader known as Bruce. In short, lyrically vivid chapters, Appanah alternates from one character’s point of view to another’s—some of them, like Marie, speaking from beyond the grave. “I used to think,” Moïse explains, “that on the day when I discovered the truth about my birth, something in my head would click into place.” Things don’t work out that way. Appanah, who was born in Mauritius and now lives in France, has written a crucial, timely novel. In it, she shows that beyond all the good intentions of the well-meaning lies a seething, anguished world that will require more than a few NGOs to recover. Moïse is just one of its victims.
Searing, lyrical, and ultimately devastating, Appanah’s latest novel might be her finest yet.
