Where Dogs Bark with Their Tails
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The tales of one family and their larger-than-many-lives sister, Antoine, weaves together the vibrant, epic story of Guadeloupe and its diaspora in Where Dogs Bark with Their Tails.
This is Antoine’s life story: an ill-fated romance between her upper-class mother and farmer father; a childhood spent deep in the countryside; the splendors and slums of Guadeloupe’s great city, Pointe-à-Pitre; the eruption of modernity; the rifts in a deeply hierarchical society under colonial rule—and the reasons she left it all behind. And to whom might she tell it?
A young woman born on the outskirts of Paris yearns to understand her lineage and métis identity. Her memories of occasional childhood visits are all that connects her to her father’s home. It is at her request that old Aunt Antoine, the eccentric and indomitable matriarch of the Ezechiels, unwinds the unforgettable tale of their family and with it a rich, layered account of Guadeloupe and its diaspora over the course of the twentieth century.
Spanning decades as it crosses the Atlantic, with lush language and vivid descriptions, Estelle-Sarah Bulle’s Where Dogs Bark with Their Tails examines the legacies of capitalism and colonialism, what it means to be caught between worlds, how it feels to lose our most beloved, and what stories might help us reconcile past, present, and future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Antillean people of Guadaloupe take center stage in Bulle's promising debut. In alternating chapters beginning in the 1940s, three biracial adult siblings relate their family's story to a member of the younger generation against the backdrop of their homeland's convoluted history. Antoine Ezechiel, the fiercely independent eldest daughter, has a shrewd business sense. Lucinde is an expert seamstress who aspires to climb into the middle class and beyond. Petit-Frere, the youngest, has been robbed by circumstance of the education he craves. After their mother dies, Antoine, at 16, leaves her poor village for Pointe-a-Pitre, where she moves in with a cousin and finds work before traveling around the Caribbean. Guadaloupe can't hold the siblings for long, and each of them winds up in Paris by the 1960s: Antoine, drawn by business opportunities; Lucinde, by fashion and celebrity; and Petit-Frere, fresh from an army post in Germany, by the Sorbonne and left-wing activism. Though the story tends to ramble, there is much conflict and loss as fights for workers' rights and self-determination heat up, and the many characters remain distinct and memorable thanks to Grawemeyer's finely tuned translation. This ambitious work heralds a welcome new voice.
