Soucouyant Book

Soucouyant has a subtitle: A Novel of Forgetting. The thing is, it's more about remembering. And about the kinds of love carrying the tenderest and most caring freight. A soucouyant, the reader is told, is an evil spirit in Caribbean folklore. In a novel turned on its head, it can also be an object of love. I liked this lovely little novel a lot. It's compassionate and loving, and though it's a first novel written by a very young man, it's full of the understanding and strength that swell to wisdom in the reader's mind. Chariandy carefully and skillfully details character and the present as if adding dolce strokes of a bow bit by bit while leading up to the crescendos of memory making up the final chapter. Because it's a novel about a woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease and the son who cares for the difficult reality of her everyday while nursing the shards of her recollection, it's a novel about forgetting. But it's more about how we can overcome the deteriorations of the mind to reach back into the most tender regions of our memories. That this edition by Arsenal Pulp Press is handsomely made, too, adds to the overall satisfaction of the read. It's a pleasure to sit with something so beautiful, both to hold in your lap and to hold in your mind.