Calgary Public Library

The return, Dany Laferrière ; translated by David Homel

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novels

The return

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742181456

Dany Laferrière ; translated by David Homel

At the age of twenty-three, the narrator hurriedly packed his bags and left behind the stifling heat of Port-au-Prince for the unending winter of Montreal. It was 1976, and Baby Doc Duvalier's regime had just killed a journalist colleague. But thirty-three years later, after his father's death, he decides to return him to Baradères, the village where he was born. How does one return from exile? In Dany's case, he grounds himself in a hotel room in Port-au-Prince, afraid to see the city he has dreamed of in Montreal. Every time he ventures out of this safety zone, the past and present collide i

Part One: Slow Preparations for Departure; The Phone Call; On the Proper Use of Sleep; Exile; The Photo; The Right Moment; Time in Books; In a Café; Behind the Frosted Window; Night Train; A Poet Named Césaire; Manhattan in the Rain; A Little Room in Brooklyn; The Suitcase; Last Morning; Part Two: A Return; From the Hotel Balcony; The Human River; What Happened to the Birds?; Death Doesn't Exist Here; Life in the Neighborhood (Before and After); Drawing a Blank; Ghetto Uprising in the Bedroom; An Emerging Writer; City of Talk; My Mother's Song; Her Sadness Dances; A Social Problem