First published in French in 2006, Ananda Devi’s powerful novella Eve out of Her Ruins is now available to English-speaking readers thanks to Jeffrey Zuckerman’s translation and a new London-based imprint, Les Fugitives. It tells the story of an unhappy group of adolescents in an impoverished district of the Mauritian capital, Port-Louis. Saadiq, a bookish Rimbaud obsessive and very much the odd one out in a posse of delinquent youths, is besotted with the eponymous Eve. She is locked in a cycle of abuse: promiscuity and prostitution on the streets and domestic violence – at the hands of her father – at home. When Eve’s closest friend, Savita, is brutally murdered in mysterious circumstances, the little gang is subjected to the attentions of a corrupt police force, and the scurrilous gossip of their local community.
Told in a sparse, economical prose with the narrative voice split across several perspectives – rotating between Eve, Saadiq, Savita and the neighbourhood tough, Clélio – Eve out of Her Ruins is a quietly harrowing portrait of the moral toxicity of groupthink, and the insidious banality of gendered violence. Headstrong and unapologetically wilful, Eve’s monologues are a bleak meditation on the contingent nature of personal sovereignty in a social world defined by deeply entrenched power relations: ‘We’re butterflies caught in a net,’ she observes, ‘even at our most exultant, even at our most resistant.’
No comments:
Post a Comment