Sweet Undoings - by Yanick Lahens (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Love and corruption drive Lahens's elegant and spirited account of contemporary Port-au-Prince, Haiti . . . The vivid scenes of joyful nightlife and passionate desire are shot through with moments of harrowing danger and sadness. Lahens offers readers a memorable tableau." --Publishers Weekly

"From the earliest pages of Lahens' novel, there's a profound sense of absence . . . This is a slow-burning and empathic work. Lahens occasionally shifts the book from third person to first for a passage or two, creating a sense of these disparate lives overlapping in unexpected ways. This is a book in which violence is never far away, but in which there's also room for hard-earned epiphanies. Lahens' latest turns its contradictions into the stuff of compelling drama." --Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Yanick Lahens was born in Port-au-Prince in 1953. After attending school and university in France, she returned to Haiti, where she taught literature at the university in Port-au-Prince and worked for the Ministry of Culture. Her first novel was published in 2000, and she won the prestigious Prix Femina in 2014 and a French Voices Award in 2015 for Moonbath. An English translation of Moonbath (tr. Emily Gogolak) was published by Deep Vellum in 2017.

Kaiama L. Glover is a writer, translator, and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College, as well as founding co-editor of archipelagos. She is the translator of Ready to Burst by Frankétienne (Archipelago, 2014), Dance on the Volcano by Marie Vieux Chauvet (Archipelago, 2017) and Hadriana in All My Dreams by René Depestre (Akashic Books, 2017).