Macadam Dreams

A cyclone inexorably sweeps Eliette into her past in this novel about the wayward violence of love and nature in Guadeloupe. In Macadam Dreams the celebrated Creole writer Gisele Pineau cunningly unveils the two cataclysms that have devastated Eliette’s life: first, the cyclone of 1928, when she was only eight years old, and now, Hurricane Hugo, whose destruction shatters the elaborate defenses the old woman has built around the sorrows and madness of her life in the small, accursed town of Savane Mulet.

As Hugo unleashes its fury, a final blow frees Eliette’s repressed memories of madness, isolation, and loss, and of the grievous failure of a prophecy that promised her a child. A story of self-discovery, Macadam Dreams speaks eloquently of the violence and poverty endured by women of this island nation—violence every bit as devastating, and seemingly inescapable, as the perpetually returning cyclone. Viewed by many as a canonical author in the Creole movement in Francophone literature, Pineau has created an extraordinary work that is recognized as a masterpiece of French-Caribbean literature.

Gisele Pineau is a psychiatric nurse and novelist living in Guadeloupe. C. Dickson is a translator living in France whose translations include Mohammad Dib’s The Savage Night and J. M. G. Le Clezio’s The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts, both published by the University of Nebraska Press.