Praise for Is Just a Movie by Earl Lovelace
“Is Just a Movie confirms Lovelace as a master storyteller of the West Indies.” —Ian Thomson, The Financial Times
“Funny, moving, endlessly inventive.” —The Times of London
“Lovelace’s fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken. In his new novel, he turns his attention to the remote fictional village of Cascadu and the lives of ordinary individuals whose relationship to politics, their peers, and their own weaknesses provide fascinating material. . . . Lovelace is bursting with things to say about this complex, heterogeneous society in the late twentieth century. This he does with a flair that at its best reaches a soaring rhapsody. The scabs of racial tension are cautiously peeled back and we witness the community’s loves, aspirations, and machinations; their little victories and defeats, their best selves and worst selves. And when things become too difficult, there is always the spirit of Carnival that presides over their lives: recuperative, cathartic, communal, celebratory.”
—Bernadine Evaristo, The Guardian
“Vivid prose that seems to stroll effortlessly across the page. Lovelace’s writing is meticulously crafted but it retains its casual elegance.” —The Times Literary Supplement
“Earl Lovelace’s genius is revealed in his capacity to consistently write characters of complex sophistication that remain fully believable as products of their landscape and time even as the author conjures up riveting and often unusual circumstances in their lives. Lovelace’s characters are compelling because of the care and profound empathy with which he explores their thinking and their feelings. Lovelace understands Trinidad and its people, its music, its history, and its psyche in ways that have made him one of the most important writers to have emerged from the Caribbean in the last seventy years. Is Just a Movie manages to combine all the elements of the best calypso—a postmodernist sense of the world, an earthbound wit, a capacity for complex tragedy, and a haunting humanity. Lovelace makes you want to be Trinidadian.”
—Kwame Dawes
“The publication of a new novel by Earl Lovelace is an event to celebrate. This satire, while biting, is tempered with a pathos and humor which direct us to the fundamental humanity we have come to recognize in all of Lovelace’s writing.”
—Lawrence Scott, author, Night Calypso
“More than any other writer, the prose of Earl Lovelace is ‘Trini to the bone.’ And like the famed Cascadu river fish after which the village in Is Just a Movie is named, once its sweet flesh is tasted, the reader is destined to return to its shores.”
—Robert Antoni, author, Divina Trace and Carnival
“Earl Lovelace is arguably the Caribbean’s greatest living novelist. In Is Just a Movie, he writes at the top of his considerable literary powers, picturing the Caribbean’s poor and powerless defending their ever-embattled humanity with resourcefulness and tenacity.”
—Randall Robinson, author, Makeda
“Music, broken hearts, revolution and scandal sway through the novel, which, like all of Lovelace’s books, is forged in the dizzying heat of Carnival and the hotbed of post-independence politics.”
—Metro (London)
Winner of the Grand Prize for Caribbean Literature from the Regional Council of Guadeloupe
Praise for Earl Lovelace’s earlier novels
“The Dragon Can’t Dance is a landmark, not in the West Indian but in the contemporary novel. . . . Nowhere have I seen more of the realities of a whole country disciplined into one imaginative whole.” —C. L. R. James, author, The Black Jacobins
“Generous, torrential prose that seems to hold every complexity—of history, of ethnicity, of reason and magic alike—within its rushing energy.” —New York Times Book Review
“Salt is a book of great beauty and force which is going to take its place as one of the classics of twentieth-century world literature.”
—Judges of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize
“Lovelace expresses powerful and often subtle ideas with memorable directness.” —Chicago Tribune
“A defining and luminously sensitive portrait of postcolonial island life. . . . A poignant, beautifully crafted tale.” —Kirkus
“[Lovelace is the] consummate Caribbean man-of-letters.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Distinguished Trinidadian novelist Lovelace writes fiction as syncopated, sinuous, and irresistible as the calypso music that punctuates the lives of his poor but proud characters. . . . Lovelace peers beneath the rigid structure of island society into the desiring hearts of men and women struggling for recognition, respect, and love. . . . As Lovelace masterfully choreographs the dance of each of his finely drawn characters, he reveals the conundrums not only of Caribbean life but of the human condition itself.”
—Booklist
“The Dragon Can’t Dance is a wonderful work filled with depth, insight, and truth. While the story is grounded in the milieu of Trinidad, its message is universal and timeless.” —Multicultural Review
“Superb lyrical writing and a moving sense of history being enacted in the lives of individuals.” —Mail on Sunday
“A deeply affecting and satisfying novel distinguished by intense lyrical writing.” —The Observer
“Carnival leaps out of these pages with deafening steel bands, pageantry and dance.” —The Daily Telegraph
“Lovelace writes with a singularly truculent acuteness, both in narrative and in the dialogue which captures West Indian speech rhythms so convincingly. . . . The Schoolmaster is quite unlike anything a British author could produce, being its own enviable thing, absolutely.” —Robert Nye, The Guardian
“Earl Lovelace’s writing has a picturesque yet dark energy, with a carnival snaking through the novel like a dangerous spine.”
—The Guardian
“Earl Lovelace writes like a man who has just discovered language and is amazed. Each word is a revelation.” —The Times
“A novelist of intelligence and sensibility.” —Sunday Times
© 2011 Earl Lovelace
First published in 2011 by Faber and Faber Ltd in London.
This edition published in 2012 by
Haymarket Books
PO Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60626
773-583-7884
www.haymarketbooks.org
Distributed to the trade in the United States
by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com.
ISBN: 978-1-60846-175-2
Published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation
and the Wallace Global Fund.
Cover image by Jed Nichols.
Printed in the United States.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
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In memory of Errol Jones
For Funso Aiyejina
And for Tiy, Maya, Lulu, Che, and Walt—and all those who have waited long enough for this book to finish
ONE
I, Kangkala
My name is Kangkala, maker of confusion, recorder of gossip, destroyer of reputations, revealer of secrets. In the same skin, I am villain and hero, victim and victor.
I