Victoire: My Mother's Mother - Softcover

Condé, Maryse

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476786364 ISBN 13: 9781476786360

Publisher: Washington Square Press, 2014

Synopsis

From the winner of the New Academy Prize in Literature (the alternative to the Nobel Prize) and critically acclaimed author of the classic historical novel Segu, Maryse Condé has pieced together the life of her maternal grandmother to create a moving and profound novel.

Maryse Condé’s personal journey of discovery and revelation becomes ours as we learn of Victoire, her white-skinned mestiza grandmother who worked as a cook for the Walbergs, a family of white Creoles, in the French Antilles.

Using her formidable skills as a storyteller, Condé describes her grandmother as having “Australian whiteness for the color of her skin...She jarred with my world of women in Italian straw bonnets and men necktied in three-piece linen suits, all of them a very black shade of black. She appeared to me doubly strange.”

Victoire was spurred by Condé’s desire to learn of her family history, resolving to begin her quest by researching the life of her grandmother. While uncovering the circumstances of Victoire’s unique life story, Condé also comes to grips with a haunting question: How could her own mother, a black militant, have been raised in the Walberg’s home, a household of whites?

Creating a work that takes you into a time and place populated with unforgettable characters that inspire and amaze, Condé’s blending of memoir and imagination, detective work and storytelling artistry, is a literary gem that you won’t soon forget.

About this title

About the Author:

Maryse Condé is the award-winning author of twelve novels, including Crossing the Mangrove, Segu, Who Slashed Celanire's Throat?, and I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem. She lives in New York and Montebello, Guadeloupe.

From Publishers Weekly:

Turning her historical fiction chops on her own family, novelist Condé (Story of the Cannibal Woman) looks at her grandmother Victoire's hard life in Guadeloupe at the turn of the 19th century, a prisoner of her illiteracy, her illegitimacy, her gender who nevertheless gave Condé's mother a life among the educated black bourgeoisie. Impregnated at 16 by a well-respected womanizer twice her age, Victoire was treated like a criminal, beaten by her father and run off from her home. After fleeing her shame, Victoire is taken on as a servant by a white Creole family, where she spent most of her life; there, her talent for cooking brings her the attention, admiration and business of prominent white Creoles. Condé proves just as impressive in her own medium: a tall man is long as a day without bread; the sea on a hot day shines like a gold bar being smelted. Deceptively slim, Condé's 15th title is a savory, complex mix of Caribbean culture, black history and the lives of ordinary women. (Jan.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Washington Square Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1476786364
• ISBN 13: 9781476786360
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208