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Hadriana in All My Dreams Spiral-Bound | 2017-05-02

René Depestre Edwidge Danticat (Foreword by) Kaiama L. Glover (Translated by)

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Legendary Haitian author Depestre combines magic, fantasy, eroticism, and delirious humor to explore universal questions of race and sexuality.

"One-of-a-kind . . . [A] ribald, free-wheeling magical-realist novel, first published in 1988 and newly, engagingly translated by Glover . . . An icon of Haitian literature serves up a hotblooded, rib-ticking, warmhearted mélange of ghost story, cultural inquiry, folk art, and véritable l'amour." --Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

"An exceptional novel . . . Depestre's masterpiece and one of the greatest examples of Haitian literature." --New York Journal of Books

Hadriana in All My Dreams, winner of the prestigious Prix Renaudot, takes place primarily during Carnival in 1938 in the Haitian village of Jacmel. A beautiful young French woman, Hadriana, is about to marry a Haitian boy from a prominent family. But on the morning of the wedding, Hadriana drinks a mysterious potion and collapses at the altar. Transformed into a zombie, her wedding becomes her funeral. She is buried by the town, revived by an evil sorcerer, then disappears into popular legend.

Set against a backdrop of magic and eroticism, and recounted with delirious humor, the novel raises universal questions about race and sexuality. The reader comes away enchanted by the marvelous reality of Haiti's Vodou culture and convinced of Depestre's lusty claim that all beings--even the undead ones--have a right to happiness and true love.

Publisher: Akashic Books
Original Binding: Paperback
Pages: 160 pages
ISBN-10: 1617755338
Item Weight: 0.4 lbs
Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.8 x 7.0 inches
"The sights and sounds of Haiti's vibrant carnival season invigorate this tale of vodou and Haitian culture . . . The truth of Hadriana's fate proves more poignant than horrifying, but in Depestre's hands, this incident is a touchstone of a culture in which distinctions between the empirical and spiritual are obscured, and whose traditional celebrations and beliefs introduce an element of the mythic into the everyday. Eroticism and humor course through his narrative. Depestre's intimacy with his subject matter and his familiarity with the people he portrays--the story is set in his hometown, at the time when he was 12 years old--give readers an insider's look at Jacmelian culture." -Publishers Weekly
Kaiama L. Glover is an associate professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, coeditor of Yale French Studies' Revisiting Marie Vieux-Chauvet: Paradoxes of Postcolonial Feminine (issue no. 128), and translator of René Depestre's Hadriana in All My Dreams, Frenkétienne's Ready to Burst, and Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Dance on the Volcano. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation.