Raphaël Confiant is rapidly becoming one of the most prolific writers in the Caribbean. Quick on the heels of the publication of Les Ténèbres extérieures, his novel about the Duvalier dictatorship, comes L’Hôtel du Bon Plaisir, which was launched in Paris today by the Mercure de France Press.
The novel tells the story of a building in the Terres-Sainvilles quarter of Fort-de-France between 1922 and 1955, a building belonging to three beké old maids (the beké are the white or nearly-white descendants of the Martinican planter class). An old convent that used to be known as the Hôtel de la Charité Saint-François de Salles, it is converted by the sisters into a haven for the poor of the neighborhood, an act through which they seek to redeem the crimes committed by their class through three centuries of slavery.
The reviewer for Montray Kréyol said of the book: “Through 33 years in the life of a building eventually destroyed by a fire, R. Confiant allows us to see the ways in which we are intimately connected to the walls that shelter us, to what degree they can gather our dreams, our sorrows and our predicaments. Fresh from the Martinique of the mid-XXth century, the book is also a melancholic meditation on the relationship between men and objects.”