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All Souls' Rising, by Madison Smartt Bell
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In this first installment of his epic Haitian trilogy, Madison Smartt Bell brings to life a decisive moment in the history of race, class, and colonialism. The slave uprising in Haiti was a momentous contribution to the tide of revolution that swept over the Western world at the end of the 1700s. A brutal rebellion that strove to overturn a vicious system of slavery, the uprising successfully transformed Haiti from a European colony to the world’s first Black republic. From the center of this horrific maelstrom, the heroic figure of Toussaint Louverture–a loyal, literate slave and both a devout Catholic and Vodouisant–emerges as the man who will take the merciless fires of violence and vengeance and forge a revolutionary war fueled by liberty and equality.
Bell assembles a kaleidoscopic portrait of this seminal movement through a tableau of characters that encompass black, white, male, female, rich, poor, free and enslaved. Pulsing with brilliant detail, All Soul’s Rising provides a visceral sense of the pain, terror, confusion, and triumph of revolution.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
- Sales Rank: #358669 in eBooks
- Published on: 2008-09-30
- Released on: 2008-09-30
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
In his breathtaking and powerful novel that garnered nominations for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, Madison Smartt Bell leaves the dark contemporary world he has so brilliantly made his own in nine previously acclaimed novels and short story collections, such as Save Me, Joe Louis. Now he turns to the past and brings viscerally to life the slave rebellion that would bring an end to the white rule of Haiti in the late eighteenth century. The result is an explosive, epic historical novel of astonishing depth and range, catapulting Bell into the ranks of the finest living authors.
From Publishers Weekly
In an astonishing novel of epic scope, Bell (Save Me, Joe Louis) follows the lives of a handful of characters from radically different social strata during the period of Haiti's struggle for independence. Nothing about that period was simple. In 1791, when the Caribbean island that native Amerindians called "Hayti" was divided between a Spanish colony in the east and the French colony of Saint Domingue, a slave revolt broke out in the French territory that claimed 12,000 lives in its first months. But the fighting wasn't only between black slaves and white owners; the colony had a Byzantine social structure that recognized 64 different "shades" of mulatto; of the half-million blacks in Saint Domingue, some 30,000 were free mulattos whose political interests often ran contrary to those of the slaves. The country's 40,000 whites were themselves divided over the outcome of the recent revolution in France. During the next 12 years, to increase their power bases, four racial/political groups?white royalists, white republicans, free mulattos and black slaves?formed and dissolved a string of unlikely alliances at a dizzying clip. Bell's principals here include a runaway slave looking for real freedom, the disturbed mistress of a razed sugar plantation and a royalist soldier in the embattled Cap Francais guard. Central to the narrative are Toussaint L'Ouverture, the enigmatic 51-year-old leader of the revolt, and Doctor Antoine Hebert, a Frenchman who shows up in Haiti just before the revolt breaks out. Hebert, who spends time as Toussaint's prisoner, falls for a freed mulatto. Warned by a young married Frenchwomen that "Who marries a black woman becomes black," the physician is appalled, yet heeds the very words he dismisses. Toussaint, too, bears the mark of contradiction. He appears to be a simple, devout man, but he has "learned a way to make his words march in more than one direction." A handful of chapters are set in 1802, when Toussaint is taken across the Atlantic as a prisoner. By omitting the middle of the revolutionary's story (during which he takes over Haiti, names himself governor-general and refuses to declare it independent), Bell astutely indicates that Toussaint, who saw himself as a noble warrior, was in fact motivated by a bizarre and self-defeating concept. By alluding to the end of the revolution only in a beautiful and haunting epilogue, moreover, Bell avoids the sense of victory that mars so many novels about revolution. Here at least, after more than 500 wrenching pages of rapes and massacres and fetuses impaled on pikes, there can be no question of a winner of the battle for Haitian liberation. Surviving it was feat enough. In Bell's hands, the chaos, marked by unspeakable acts of violence, that surrounds these characters somehow elucidates the nobility of even the most craven among them.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
As has been the case throughout much of its history, Haiti in the 1790s was racked by violence?the result of an intricate and sometimes brutal system of racial and social classification exacerbated by the upheavals of the French Revolution. Thus, Haiti provides an ideal setting for Bell (Save Me Joe Louis, LJ 5/1/93) to explore his interest in the motivations that all too often propel us to give vent to our baser instincts. The story centers on the bloody beginnings of the rebellion from which Toussaint L'Ouverture, a seemingly docile slave, eventually emerged as the self-proclaimed governor general of the island. Bell has crafted a somewhat complex and violent tale?it opens with a woman being crucified for killing her baby so he would not have to live the life of a slave. Not for the faint-hearted, this work offers a fascinating glimpse into a little-known episode of hemispheric history. One can be glad for the chronology and the glossary Bell includes. Most appropriate for public libraries and academic libraries where Bell's work is popular.
-?David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
42 of 45 people found the following review helpful.
Arise and Weep
By Larry Dilg
This is the kind of book that can make you seem obsessed. Once you enter Bell's world, you're disturbed, excited, and depressed, but you can't stop talking about the book you're in. It's like having a secret that's too heavy to really divulge, but you keep alluding to parts of it, as if you were talking in code. People look at you like you're sort of cracked, but generally they think it will pass. The blood-soaked history of Haiti is cause for despair, but the revolutionary spirit of the 1790's makes you hope in spite of what you know. Toussaint is one of the great heroes of all time, and Bell makes him both human and epic. In this book, you don't develop much emotional connection to him -- that's the province of more fictional characters like Doctor Hebert and Riau -- but you care immensely about his success as a leader. You want him to be as great, as visionary, as Martin Luther King, but he belongs to a different era, a violent one. The backdrop of the French Revolution, with its mixture of rights and terror, is essential to the drama of All Souls' Rising, and most readers will need to read the appendix several times to stay abreast of royalists, Jacobins, and emissaries from the Mother Country. Some knowledge of American history might help --Jefferson, for instance, opposed the Haitian slave revolt because he feared something similar in the US which would deprive him of slaves plus the boost he got from the 3/5 compromise which gave white planters more votes, while Adams and Pickering favored emancipation and liberation -- but you can follow the essential plot without historical annotation. It's the kind of gravy that lifts the book to a higher level, but readers looking for love, betrayal, courage, devotion, cruelty, sex, and perverse logic will be sated. Contemporary maps won't help with many of the locations, but Bell has a map in the second volume of the trilogy, Master of the Crossroads, that helped me get a sense of place. The themes and the style of the book are managed with power and grace. Bell's a hell of a writer, and I believed each of the voices in the narrative. Big books like this sweep you up and carry you away, but this book sweeps the reader into a present time of continuous revolution in Haiti, slaughter in Sudan, disease and unending horror in much of Africa, war in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc. The blood drama of Bell's Haiti gives us a red filter for understanding our own time. At the end of the book, I'm thrilled by the revolutionary possibilities, depressed by the inevitable destruction and failure, and grateful for every moment of compassion and kindness however small. I can't wait to read the next volume.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Ominous, powerful, and exotic
By A Customer
This story of the Haitian revolution is violent and disturbing, but its violence is handled with care and placed in the context of each character's psychology and motivations. The characters are believable, the history seems painstakingly accurate, and the sensory descriptions are rich and vivid. The book leaves you with new, unresolved questions about what race is -- a topic which obsesses many of the characters in the book as well.
An unforgettable read and an important one.
23 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
comprehensible and worthwhile
By Amelia Sunderland
I found this an extremely difficult read: I was 16, knew nothing about Haiti's history, and spoke no French. I took nearly three months to finish reading the book, because every so often I had to take a break from the horrific violence Bell portrays. In the end, however, this novel remains one of the most impressive I have ever read, in terms of the way it really made me think. The depths of terror and violence to which Bell's characters resorted shocked me. But I did not lose sight of the novel's bigger picture. Ultimately, I have little sympathy for the book's reviewers who could not see past the novel's violence and complexity. Five tries to get through the book? Try a Dick and Jane reader, then, and come back in a few years.
See all 40 customer reviews...
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