Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Triptych (Modern Library Torchbearers) Kindle Edition

What I find most compelling about Marie Vieux-Chauvet's work is her lucid, relentless and fearless search for an explanation of the Haitian predicament. Rather than merely pointing the finger at the Duvalierist regime, which is certainly not guiltless, she valiantly takes a look at social class distinctions hidden behind the issues of color and religion. Ultimately, through her unforgiving lens, we come to see true evil incarnated in a society that, in view of its celebrated origins, should have known solidarity and compassion.

Not for the faint of heart, but brings to light the horrible atrocities committed in Haiti, and mirror what happened/happens in the poorer parts of this hemisphere.

Triptych of Haiti includes aspects of Haitian culture which is of interest to me.

Very interesting read....got this as a gift...they liked it

Book is in awesome condition. I would have thought it was new.

A very interesting introspect of a bourgeois writer in the race, class and gender dynamic of Haitian elite households. A real paradox.

This is a great book on the Haiti during the 1950's. the author writes very well and describes each of her characters in detail, such that you get to hear what each is saying or not and what they are thinking. She describes a country under a demonic police force and the Hatian cast system and the self destructive revenge each character has toward others.

Here are three powerful, well-written novellas from a female Haitian author. Like most of the Haitian upper class, Marie Vieux-Chauvet (1916-1973) was a light-skinned mixed-race person educated in Haiti in the French tradition and who eventually moved to New York. All of the novellas reflect the incredible chaos, brutality and societal inequity that Haiti has undergone. Haiti is essentially an African nation in the Western Hemisphere. In 1804 the African slaves revolted and killed or drove off all the white population and in imitation of their former white masters, the new black and mulatto leaders basically enslaved an entire nation.In the first novella, Love, three sisters live together in the same antiquated mansion and they all love the same man – the husband of the plainest one of the three. The story is told by the most beautiful of the three who is a very dark-skinned woman who feels outcast by the lighter-skinned upper-class society including her own family. She develops a self-hated, thinking: “…I look like a fly in a bowl of milk.” To give you an idea of the atmosphere in the wealthiest part of the city: the sisters throw cocktail parties while beggars live under their front porch and they play music loudly so their guests can’t hear the screams of those being tortured in the nearby prison. The story ends with a murder.In Anger, another wealthy mulatto family suddenly finds their property seized. They end up sacrificing their daughter to right this wrong. Again the story ends with multiple murders and despair, to put it mildly.In Madness, three young male poets of various racial mix are outcasts of society. They are starving and have had only rum for a week. They start to hallucinate and their antics attract the police; they are arrested with a predictable outcome. As in all three stories, terror and despair prevail. Beggars march through the streets in each story; “we could smell them before we could see them;” the beggars wait for someone to arm them with guns or machetes and make them into an “army.”There is an introduction by Edwidge Danticat and a preface by the translator that give away a lot of the plot so you may want to read those last.

I read this book as part of the Around the World Reading Challenge that I am undertaking, where you read a book written by (or based in) an author born in every country of the world, and along with the other books that I have so far read, found that this helped to broaden my knowledge of the country in question considerably.Like the previous reviewer, I had very little knowledge of Haiti beyond the news headlines concerning the earthquake of 2010, and knew nothing of the islands history. I did not realise that it is in fact the only country in the world borne from a slave rebellion. That alone will tell you a great deal.Of course the country has had its problems with corruption and abuse of power, and this comes across very much in the authors writing. Love, Anger, Madness is considered the authors seminal work, and it is easy to see why. It consists of three novellas, or short novels, each of which is named after the three emotions of Love, Anger and Madness, emotions that I am sure we can all identify with, although not in the same way of course as these characters, for everyone's story is unique.Each of the three novellas is progressively shorter than the last, and explores different but connected themes, but the one thing they have in common is that the leading characters in each of them are what the Haitians refer to as "mulattos" (that is to say, mixed race). I did not even realise until I read this book that were such as thing as White Haitians, and there are probably less of them now compared to when these books were written back in the 1960's. The author was born in a different era from what we know, in 1916, the same year as my own father, but of course some things never change, and sadly one of them is the fact that to a large extent, we do all live in fear - ...Vieux-Chauvet did an amazing job of portraying what life was like in her country during those times, depicting the fear and the oppression that her people felt, along with the love, anger and madness that went alongside. Each book is different, yet each book is the same, presenting these same truths in different ways to help her readers, and indeed the world, to understand. I am sure that this was not her intention, but to me at least, this book can be viewed as a reflection of the inner turmoil that we all experience, with our myriad of emotions, as we confront our own madness until all that remains is love.

I read this as part of a course on Haitian literature. While incredibly harrowing and at times difficult to read, it's a very important work. It is a brave series of novellas which illustrate what life is like under dictatorship. The translation is clunky in places, so I would suggest reading the original French if you are able to. I'd recommend it if you'd like something different; the stories can be read in any order, so if you find 'Amour' a little dry, I'd suggest starting with 'Colere'.

Intricate look into the homes and minds of people trapped in times of turmoil. Beautifully written and constantly compelling.