• Review Archives
  • Caribbean Literary + Cultural Blogroll
  • Story Sundays
  • Charting Children’s Literature
  • Reading Challenges & Projects
  • Review Policy + Contact Form

Novel Niche: A Place for Books

~ Ruminations, reviews and recipes all cooked in a literary cauldron: al(most always) book reviews, all the time.

Novel Niche: A Place for Books

Tag Archives: Tiphanie Yanique

14. How to Escape from a Leper Colony by Tiphanie Yanique

12 Saturday Feb 2011

Posted by Shivanee @ Novel Niche in Caribbean Writers Challenge 2011, Reading Challenges, Reviews 2011

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Caribbean Writers Challenge 2011, Fiction, Graywolf Press, How to Escape From a Leper Colony, Review, Short Story Collection, Tiphanie Yanique

Published in 2010 by Graywolf Press.

An S. Mariella Gable Book (an award given by the College of Saint Benedict for an important work of literature published by Graywolf Press)

Winner of the Fiction Category Prize, OCM Bocas 2011.

Shortlisted for the overall OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2011.

“I get her arms in front and see words written on them. It freaks me out. But it’s just words. ‘Stop looking,’ she says. ‘Stop reading.’ Lord Harry the Judge. I lay back in my seat and I just ask, ‘This is stupid. You couldn’t find no paper?’ She shakes her head, ‘I left my notebook.’ I open the golf and show her the roller paper, like a small notepad. ‘I didn’t think of that’ she say with her voice going all Yankee now. And then she crying like I hit her or something. She sit on her hands the whole drive back. Keep her arms tight by her side. Tonight, I think, I going kiss those arms. I going lick every word if she let me.”

from “Street Man”

I loathe exaggeration, especially when it comes to enthusiasm. I prefer my praise to be as precise as possible. Sadly, this means that much of my best loved phrases must languish, unused, waiting for true beauty to capture them. One such is borrowed from a film: to feel something “like a riot in the heart, and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.”

Tiphanie Yanique’s premiere publication is impressive. A collection of short fiction and a novella, How to Escape from a Leper Colony is remarkable in that it feels neither solely craft nor character-driven, yet reads as a spellbinding marriage of both. Here is short fiction to get you excited about the genre entire. Here is a novella you will want to reread until the people in it are achingly familiar to you, a novella which shows its full lustre in its unabridged format, as opposed to the more dim showing it made in Akashic Books’ 2008 anthology, Trinidad Noir. At a handful of pages shy of the two hundred mark, Yanique’s prose begs to be read in one sitting. I  read it cover to cover in bed, bleary-eyed with intensity, and when I reached the last line of the last story, “Kill the Rabbits”, (which I would have loved to see even further fleshed out) I felt that I had not had enough.

How to Escape a Leper Colony features eight pieces. The titular story will show you some of the reasons why an island of lepers and the nuns treating them walk into the sea. “The Bridge Stories” is a compendium of narratives that tells the same story, marking it multiple ways for tragedy and release. “Street Man” reads like a tale you’d hear from the man himself, in a crowded bar, over beers and your interjections of, “Nah, man!”, “Oh gosh, man!”, “For real, man?”. In “The Saving Work”, two white women who’ve moved their lives to the Caribbean puzzle out the truth at the root of why they hate each other so (with a burning church providing the backdrop). “Canoe Sickness” offers a retrospective of a young boy’s thwarted dream of pro-football glory (the least evocative of the pieces, for me). Mason finds a hideaway chapel in Houston that reminds him of his Jamaica home (in strangely erotic tones, too) in the exquisite “Where Tourists Don’t Go”. In the vein of “The Bridge Stories”, “The International Shop of Coffins” is a multipart exposition of grief, distance and the things we’ll do for love. Finally, “Kill the Rabbits” (as authentic an account of the sweet madness that is Carnival as ever I read one) introduces us to three seemingly-different people in the Virgin Islands, and the unusual ways they are fettered, to each other and to love.

Straddling a swinging bridge betwixt magical allegory and gritty realism, these stories are superbly-wrought. Yanique’s eye to detail is exceptional; her attention to a credibility of tone and voice—to the way a person speaks, or internalizes a situation—is finely-tuned. There are numerous delights here for the careful reader that will be missed, and no mistake, by any page-skimmers.  Unearthing sleight of hand contradictions, such as the difference between what characters say and what they do or mean is a particular treasure. What makes it sweeter is that Yanique never contradicts herself; we spend no time running after her sentences, filling in plot holes with frustration. There are no perfect, sparkle-toothed island exotics waving for the approval of tourists here, and this is a relief.

For all that How to Escape from a Leper Colony is a debut offering, nothing about Yanique’s work heralds it as mawkish or sickly desperate to please. Can my desire for this book to have been a longer collection truly be a complaint? Hardly not, though I do wonder how two or three more stories would have affected the impact of the reading. That is a bold-faced hypothetical, however, so I will precisely declare: I love this writer’s writing, and I look forward, impatiently, to reading another riot in the heart from Tiphanie Yanique.

“One of my teachers once said that history has no influence on land, that land is outside of history. He lied or he was mistaken. History has carved down mountains. History has drenched out rivers. History has made the land, and the land has, when under duress, made history. […] No one and no thing is unmoved by human history, and it is a sad, sad truth. But that Carnival the land had decided to defy history. And this, like my body, was a bit of an impossible thing —  but an admirable thing as all impossible things are.”

from “Kill the Rabbits”

This book, and 11 more, are part of my official reading list (which can be found in my sign-up post here) for the 2011 Caribbean Writers Challenge. 

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Twitter
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Sheaves upon sheaves of novel musings straight to your mail!

Join 331 other followers

Novel Niche is Social!

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Goodreads

The Eternal TBR

Popular Perusals

  • "Birdshooting Season" - Olive Senior
    "Birdshooting Season" - Olive Senior
  • A Week in Walcott • "The Spoiler's Return"
    A Week in Walcott • "The Spoiler's Return"
  • "My Brother My Wound" - Natalie Diaz
    "My Brother My Wound" - Natalie Diaz
  • "My God, It's Full of Stars" - Tracy K. Smith
    "My God, It's Full of Stars" - Tracy K. Smith
  • "The 17-Year-Old & the Gay Bar" - Danez Smith
    "The 17-Year-Old & the Gay Bar" - Danez Smith
  • "Ode to Northern Alberta" - Billy-Ray Belcourt
    "Ode to Northern Alberta" - Billy-Ray Belcourt
  • "Di Great Insohreckshan" - Linton Kwesi Johnson
    "Di Great Insohreckshan" - Linton Kwesi Johnson
  • 6. Out on Main Street by Shani Mootoo
    6. Out on Main Street by Shani Mootoo
  • "Portrait of a Diasporican Friend" - Ana Portnoy Brimmer
    "Portrait of a Diasporican Friend" - Ana Portnoy Brimmer
  • "Poem in Noisy Mouthfuls" - Chen Chen
    "Poem in Noisy Mouthfuls" - Chen Chen

Currently Reading

Just Finished…

What S/H/(W)e Said

  • Revolutionary Mothering in Novel Niche - PM Press on Guest Review: Revolutionary Mothering: Love On The Front Lines
  • Almah LaVon Rice-Faina on Guest Review: Revolutionary Mothering: Love On The Front Lines
  • thecornocopiaallotment on “All Hallows” – Louise Glück
  • Shivanee @ Novel Niche on “I Saw the Devil in the Cane Fields” – Shastra Deo
  • Andrew Blackman on “I Saw the Devil in the Cane Fields” – Shastra Deo
  • “Mirror, Reflect Our Unknown Selves” – Tlotlo Tsamaase | Novel Niche: A Place for Books on “Daphne” – Roberto Rodriguez-Estrada
  • Shivanee @ Novel Niche on “I Saw the Devil in the Cane Fields” – Shastra Deo
  • Andrew Blackman on “I Saw the Devil in the Cane Fields” – Shastra Deo
  • Andrew Blackman on “Can You Speak English?” – Natalie Wee
  • Steve @poetrykoan on “La Brea” – Andre Bagoo

Twitter Updates

  • 🙏🏽 🌺 🙏🏽 twitter.com/Maia_Elsner/st… 19 hours ago
  • Hard copy or hard no. twitter.com/NoreenMasud/st… 1 day ago
  • RT @paperbasedbooks: “Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the questio… 2 days ago
  • Squad! *rolls out in thigh high facekickers and assless chaps* twitter.com/XoeSazzle/stat… 3 days ago
  • The fucktriarchy, my child. *sharpens oyster knife* twitter.com/DeoWatti/statu… 3 days ago

New at Novel Niche

  • Dearly Departed: A Conversation with Anu Lakhan
  • “The Whistler” – A Mary Oliver Primer
  • “The Fish” – A Mary Oliver Primer
  • “Wild Geese” – A Mary Oliver Primer
  • “How to Fix a Dancer When it Breaks” – Genevieve DeGuzman

Categories

  • A Week in Walcott (7)
  • Bookends (24)
    • Author Interviews and Features (3)
    • Bocas Lit Fest (5)
    • Guest Blogs (2)
    • Literary Events (1)
    • Literary Letters (1)
    • Novel Gift Exchanges (4)
    • Reading Ruminations (2)
    • Yourself In Books (2)
  • Charting Children's Literature (4)
  • Give Feral Thanks – A Mary Oliver Primer (3)
  • Guest Reviews (6)
  • Here for the Unicorn Blood (29)
  • Miscellanities (1)
  • NetGalley (2)
  • Other Kinds of Men (26)
  • Puncheon and Vetiver (31)
  • Reading Challenges (11)
    • British Book Challenge 2011 (4)
    • Caribbean Writers Challenge 2011 (5)
  • Requested Reviews (4)
  • Reviews 2010 (9)
  • Reviews 2011 (16)
  • Reviews 2012 (17)
  • Reviews 2013 (3)
  • Reviews 2014 (3)
  • Reviews 2016 (1)
  • Story by Story Reading (1)
  • Story Sundays (14)
  • Trinidad Guardian Sunday Arts Section (8)

Archives

Novel Niche's Eighth Anniversary!April 23, 2018

Tagnificent!

20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth Alexandra Fuller Andre Bagoo A Queer POC Poetry Reader A Speculative Poetry Reader A Week in Walcott Bocas Lit Fest 2012 Bocas Lit Fest 2013 Brandon O'Brien British Book Challenge 2011 Caribbean Writers Challenge 2011 Carol Shields Catherynne M. Valente Charting Children's Literature Chatto & Windus Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Chronicle Books Cormac McCarthy Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné Derek Walcott Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight Feature/Interview Fiction Fruit of the Lemon Give Feral Thanks Gregory Maguire Guest Review Half of a Yellow Sun HarperCollins Here for the Unicorn Blood Is Just a Movie Jason McIntyre K. Jared Hosein Karen Lord Lisa Allen-Agostini Littletown Secrets Loretta Collins Klobah Mary Oliver Memoir Midnight in Your Arms Monique Roffey Morgan Kelly NaPoWriMo NetGalley Non-Fiction Novel Novel Gifts Olive Senior Other Kinds of Men Peepal Tree Press Picador Poetry Potbake Productions Puncheon and Vetiver Rajiv Mohabir Reading Ruminations Requested Review Review Rosamond S. King Shani Mootoo Shara McCallum Sherman Alexie Short Story Collection Simon & Schuster Sonia Farmer Stephen King Story Sunday The Allen Prize for Young Writers The Road Trinidad Guardian Sunday Arts Section Unless Vintage/Anchor Books Vintage Books Xiaolu Guo Yourself in Books

Header, divider and button images created by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné.

Creative Commons License
This work by Shivanee Ramlochan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×
    loading Cancel
    Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
    Email check failed, please try again
    Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
    Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
    To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
    %d bloggers like this: