PLEASANTVIEW, multiple prize-winning Trinidadian story-novel

PLEASANTVIEW: A Novel in Stories
CELESTE MOHAMMED
Ig Publishing
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

THE 2022 OCM BOCAS PRIZE FICTION WINNER!

2022 FIRECRACKER AWARD for FICTION WINNER!

The Publisher Says: Coconut trees. Carnival. Rum and coke. To many outsiders, these idyllic images represent the supposed easy life in Caribbean nations such as Trinidad and Tobago. However, the reality is far different for those who live there—a society where poverty and patriarchy savagely rule, and where love and revenge often go hand in hand.

Written in a combination of English and Trinidad Creole, Pleasantview reveals the dark side of the Caribbean dream. In this novel-in-stories about a fictional town in Trinidad, we meet a political candidate who sets out to slaughter endangered turtles for fun, while his rival candidate beats his “outside-woman,” so badly she ends up losing their baby. On the night of a political rally, the abused woman exacts a very public revenge, the trajectory of which echoes through Pleasantview, ending with one boy introducing another boy to a gun and to an ideology which will help him aim the weapon.

Merging the beauty and brutality of Trinidadian culture evoked by writers such as Ingrid Persaud and Claire Adam with the linguistic experimentation of Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, Pleasantview is a landmark work from an important new voice in international literary fiction.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: PLEASANTVIEW is a mixed-idiom collection of Trinidadian fictions that's come in for a heaping helping of praise and prizes...albeit from very literary sources...was my next foray (after If I Survive You) into Caribbean-inflected English-language storytelling. What a dramatic difference between the two projects.

Where Escoffery's Booker-nominated Jamaican-American work was firmly set in the US, this delightful braid of nine stories is emphatically not about, for, or inclusive of US sensibilities. For this reader, that is a feature not a bug. While Author Mohammed does maintain Standard English spellings throughout the book, her inflections and emphases are decidedly NOT Standard English. Her characters would likely struggle to speak Standard English. Those of us without our life-experience being inclusive of other forms of English will likely have to make an effort to get into the flow of this idiom. It is always a good idea for everyone to read in and about areas that are not centering our own unique experiences. This task is made easier, and harder, when reading English that is not the same as the English most of my readers speak. The effort one puts in to see this magnificent, flexible tool of a language used in unfamiliar ways is a big benefit to those who make it. We're seeing our words and our understanding of them used and applied to think thoughts we could never come up with. Isn't that the entire point of reading fiction? Stretch your horizons a bit more with every read.

I am sure you're expecting that I will use the Bryce Method of offering a story-by-story opinion of each piece. Well, you lose this time. The nine stories are:

Prologue: The Dragon's Mouth (Bocas del Dragón)
Endangered Species
White Envelope
The Ides of March
Home
Loosed
Six Months
Santimanitay
Epilogue: Kings of the Earth

I've chosen not to review them individually this time because that is just not the point of this exercise; no one story here is exciseable from its context to present on its own as a really satisfying story. Contrast this with the above-referenced If I Survive You, whose stories are satisfying as stories, if slightly less so as a braid; but they weren't written to be one, so that's not shade. The difference is in expectations. Interconnected stories share a lot of themes, or characters, or settings; braided stories share all of those things and operate towards one storytelling goal, as novels do, though without a novel's unity of voice and/or purpose.

PLEASANTVIEW succeeds as a braid of stories, a polyvocal novel, in a way that a more ordinary novelistic structure would strain to match. It succeeds on its own terms, and offers us as readers access to a very different way of being in the world. The best kind of fiction, then, is what this is.