Sweet Undoings

Yanick Lahens, Kaiama L. Glover

Description

• Serialization outreach targeting Granta, Paris Review, Astra Magazine, BOMB, n+1, Electric Literature, Literary Hub
• National review and feature outreach to print publications (NYTBR, New York Times, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, LA Times, Boston Globe) and online (NPR, Literary Hub, Buzzfeed, The Millions)
• Targeted outreach to publications spotlighting translated literature: World Literature Today, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, EuropeNow
• Virtual events featuring author and translator; Promotion at/events pitched to PEN World Voices Festival
• Promotion on the publisher’s website (deepvellum.org), Twitter feed (@deepvellum), and Facebook page (/deepvellum); publisher’s e-newsletter to booksellers, reviewers, librarians

Yanick Lahens leads us into a breathless intrigue with her newest portrait of Haiti, Sweet Undoings.

In Port-au-Prince, violence never consumes. It finds its counterpart in a "high-pitched sweetness", a sweetness that overwhelms Francis, a French journalist, one evening at the Corossol Restaurant-Bar, when the broken, rich voice of lounge singer Brune rises from the microphone.

Brune's father, Judge Berthier, was assassinated, guilty of maintaining integrity in a city where everything is bought. Six months after this disappearance, Brune wholly refuses to come to terms with what happened. Her uncle Pierre, a gay man who spent his youth abroad to avoid persecution, refuses to give up on solving this unpunished crime.

Alongside Brune and Pierre, Francis becomes acquainted with myriad other voices of Port-au-Prince, including Ézèchiel, a poet desperate to escape his miserable neighborhood; Waner, a diligent pacifist; and Ronny the American, at ease in Haiti as in a second homeland. 

Drawing its power from the bowels of the city, Sweet Undoings moves with a rapid, electric syncopation, gradually and tenderly revealing the richness of the lives within.

Sujets

• Detective
• Mystery
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Deep Vellum Publishing
• Date de parution: 11 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781646052417
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Sweet Undoings
Yanick Lahens
TRANSLATED BY KAIAMA GLOVER
DEEP VELLUM PUBLISHING
DALLAS, TEXAS
Deep Vellum Publishing
3000 Commerce St., Dallas,Texas 75226
deepvellum.org · @deepvellum
Deep Vellum is a 501c3 nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013 with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature.
Copyright © Sabine Wespieser Éditeur, 2018
Translation copyright © Kaiama Glover, 2022
Originally published in French as Douces déroutes by Sabine Wespieser Éditeur in Paris, France, in 2018.
First US Edition, 2022
Support for this publication was provided in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Amazon Literary Partnership, the Texas Commission on the Arts, City of Dallas Office of Arts & Culture, and the George & Fay Young Foundation.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Lahens, Yanick, author. | Glover, Kaiama L., 1972- translator.
Title: Sweet undoings / Yanick Lahens ; translated by Kaiama Glover.
Other titles: Douces déroutes. English
Description: First US edition. | Dallas, Texas : Deep Vellum Publishing,
[2023]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022043760 | ISBN 9781646052158 (trade paperback) | ISBN
9781646052417 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Detective and mystery fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PQ3949.2.L295 S94 2023
LC record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2022043760
ISBN (TPB) 978-1-64605-215-8 | ISBN (Ebook) 978-1-64605-241-7
Cover design by Chad Felix
Interior layout and typesetting by KGT
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
The metabolic rate of history is too fast for us to observe it … At the same time, the metabolic rate of geology is too slow for us to perceive it, so that, from birth to death, it seems to us who are caught in the beat of our own individual human hearts that everything happening on this planet is what happens to us, personally, privately, secretly.
—Russell Banks, Continental Drift
Here, I am relating a personal history. Humanity has a personal history in every person.
—George Sand, The Story of My Life
My darling wife,
I hope you’re reading this letter at daybreak. In those minutes where you and I used to try, in our own little way, to keep the raging fires of the outside world at bay. Be strong, just as I’m trying to be strong in this moment as I write these words to you. The pressure on me is becoming more intense, and barely disguised threats leave no further doubt as to the fate reserved for me by certain forces. But I’m gathering evidence. Undeterred. As you can imagine, the proof is overwhelming. I expect some procedural game-playing—you know well the shamelessness of our lawmen. I’ve been refining the case file to the point of losing sleep, but I’ll take this to the very end. Naming certain things has become a criminal offense, though the fact that such things exist has not. I see your face pleading with me to be careful, just as I never forget your words: “Dear God, how lucky I am to fall asleep and to awaken next to a true gentleman!” But our times are governed by different rules. Rules that relegate us to a state of disgrace as brutal as it is ennobling. Let your tears flow, but never bend the knee. Never.
The vice tightens. A friend I’ve not been in touch with for years came to visit me just a few days ago. He was clearly on a mission. He reminded me that I have a wife and a daughter. Said that life still has plenty of hidden charms. That my car isn’t really very well suited to the potholed roads of the capital. That, for a man of my caliber, there are much lovelier neighborhoods than the one we currently live in. I smiled without saying anything. He left, grimacing with a combination of astonishment and regret. Yesterday, two men on a motorbike followed me to the turnoff leading to the house and, as they passed beside my car, the man in the back lifted his T-shirt to show me his 9mm. And then there was that voice on the telephone, laughing when I picked up, insulting me. Or the one that simply muttered my name while breathing crazily into the receiver. Some of my colleagues shoot me fearful, shifty, empty looks—and they never linger in my company. Others expect me to just toe the line like they do. Those are the ones who look at me with a kind of complicity, as if we’ve run into one another in the dismal light of some brothel. I feel no kinship with any of them. But I won’t leave. There are always those who leave and those who remain. I’m one of the latter. Thanks to my music, I’ve already gotten to see all the ports of the world. I’ve passed this dream of the open sea along to our daughter. Every time you kiss Brune’s eyelids, you must remind her to never sully her gaze, to leave any darkness behind her. Always. Darkness might be a friend, or a lover. It might even end up being her country. Who knows? If she ever wants to leave, no matter what, let her. You may think you’re losing her, but you’ll be saving her. Tell anyone who sheds tears for me that they have my infinite affection. Lean on your brother Pierre. He’s the most solid, the most lucid of us all.
I love your gentleness, I love your silences. After all these years I still consume your meals and your body with the same appetite. The bed will be very cold, the bedroom empty. Forgive me.
To all those who come to console you and tell you they’ve lost hope or courage—or that they’ve given themselves to the Lord, tell them that this all happened because they pretended not to know and didn’t want to see. The Lord is nothing more than a smokescreen for them.
At the very last moment, I’ll long to hear Brune sing once more. We so desperately need those kinds of journeys—sightless, without a safety net, without guardrails—toward beauty.
Your husband,
Raymond
1
When Cyprien slows down at the red light, the screams of the sirens are still far behind him. Haunted by images of the past night, he doesn’t hear them and, without thinking, turns on the radio. You are a wonder of nature! A people of creative geniuses! You are Audi! You are Haiti! His strange dream gets mixed up with these words—words that over the last few weeks have taken over a good portion of his brain: Audi! Haiti! But with the insistent, anxious news from the journalists never far behind, both dream and Audi alike always end up swept away by a sort of dark storm. It’s hard to calmly announce that entire fields of pearl millet have been ravaged by a fungus; that the main public hospital has no more medication, gauze, or sterile gloves; that people are being killed over a few bills withdrawn from the bank; or that a judge like Raymond Berthier has been assassinated for wanting to know too much. Living here means managing the casualties. The city is a cauldron and you’ve got to reach for the froth if you don’t want to end up scraping the bottom. Cyprien grips the steering wheel with both hands. Some part of his brain needs to stay aware of the passersby, of the two motorbikes rolling up on his left, of the packed taptap bus coming to a stop just in front of him so that a passenger can hop on the back, of the motorbike slipping between him and the colorful taptap . It’s hot. Maybe ninety degrees in the shade.
—
The crowd—teeming, chattering—rushes along on a narrow strip of sidewalk between the stands and the market women’s baskets on the ground. The trash hasn’t been picked up for three days. Cyprien has become less and less tolerant of this rosary of misfortune being recited all day, every day—the scorching heat, the noise of the crowd, and the stench of the gutters. He adjusts the air conditioning to seventy degrees. Full blast, as his colleagues would say! The light turns green. In his modest Hyundai Tucson, the air conditioner constantly goes full throttle. At seventy degrees in the passenger seat, you forget what it’s like at the bottom of the cauldron! He adjusts the patchouli air freshener on the dashboard. Brune finds it overly sweet, but he likes it. It’s a vulgar smell, she’d even said to him one time. He still thinks about that and remembers saying to her that she always had strong opinions about everything, in any event, and that he wasn’t going to change the scent. Cyprien listens distractedly and for the umpteenth time to the warm voice on the radio extolling the virtues of the Audi Quattro in between two tragedies: You are a wonder of nature. You are an epic, legendary people, you are a brave, resilient people, you are Audi, you are Haiti, land of the Quattro. As much as Cyprien loves that gleaming, powerful, classy piece of machinery (truly, hats off to those Germans!), and despite the announcer’s well-rehearsed voice, it’s still tough for him to make the connection between Audi and Haiti. Audi and Haiti: you really had to work to come up with that one. Fuzziness having settled into his brain, his intellect more or less chloroformed, he listens over and over to those words ringing out. Tinkling. Words that, put end to end, mean nothing. The nothingness of vertigo. Softening up your brain. Advertisements have that virtue, that ability to render the improbable perfectly plausible.
The roar of the sirens gets closer, as do the flashing lights. Passersby on either side slow down and turn their heads. Cyprien doesn’t notice anything. The strange dream from last night won’t let go of him either. Strange isn’t exactly the right word. The dream seems to him like some sort of premonition, foreboding, emerging from the most tucked-away part of his being, the darkest part. He’s still completely shaken. Could the dream have something to do with his sex life? He’d thought so at first, but nevertheless has his doubts. He’s well past the age of wet dreams. His mother had raised him on her own, along with his two sisters. That intimacy had made him into a man who loves women—even though, like many men, his brain tended to drop into his crotch at the sight of a skirt or a tight pair of pants. And then, too, things were going perfectly