06 Apr / Tropic of Violence by Nathacha Appanah, translated by Geoffrey Strachan [in Booklist]
*STARRED REVIEW
How can a story so harrowing, so wrenching be so gorgeous? In her third novel exquisitely translated by award-winning Geoffrey Strachan, Mauritius-born journalist and translator Nathacha Appanah (Waiting for Tomorrow, 2018) presents the beginning and dissolution of a boy, Moïse, and all the people who, La Ronde-style, nurture, enable, and destroy him. Each slim chapter bears the name, including Moïse’s, of those responsible for his existence on Mayotte, “a département of France” in the Indian Ocean riddled with illegal immigration and stifling poverty.
French nurse Marie didn’t give Moïse life, but she provided legal status, a safe home, unconditional love. Abandoned by his teenage mother, who washed up on unfriendly shores, Moïse reciprocally saved Marie, who had been driven almost insane by her longing for a child. But at 13, Moïse is suddenly alone when Marie dies. By 15, Moïse is a murderer sitting in a jail cell after shooting the slum’s vicious gang leader; corpse he may be, but Bruce gets his say in revealing his brutal rise to becoming “the king of Gaza.” Police officer Olivier, to whom Moïse confesses, wants to save the boy, and temporary aid-worker Stéphane’s white-savior complex induces him to think that he will save the boy.
Eloquent, horrifying, surreally relevant, Violence proves revelatory.
Review: “Fiction,” Booklist, April 1, 2020
Readers: Adult
Published: 2016 (France), 2020 (United States)