Compère général Soleil

First edition, one of 35 numbered copies on pur fil, most limited issue. In addition, 25 hors-commerce copies on vélin labeur.

A fine and rare copy.

The French writer Louis Aragon had held the manuscript in his hands since late 1954 and had it circulated it through Parisian literary circles. Compère Général Soleil was published in 1955 by Gallimard immediately placed its author, then thirty-three years old, alongside Asturias, García Márquez, Carpentier, Guillén, Wright, and Hemingway. Born in Haiti in 1922, Alexis wrote a novel both poignant and sardonic, drawing its title from Voodoo mythology and its narrative from what Léonard Sainville called the "chant de la terre haïtienne": through the lens of Haitian oppression, he weaves the conflicted relationship between man, his land, and the natural world, grounding that relationship in a humanist vision and a poetically committed prose. René Depestre, writing on the occasion of the work's reissue, described it as a "livre-homme-lumière" that resists time with youthful defiance, while Gérard Pierre-Charles saw in Alexis "a symbol of the suffering but heroic and fighting Haiti", concluding: "A people from which Jacques Stephen Alexis emerged can never die". The author would be murdered by Duvalier's Tonton Macoutes in April 1961, at the age of thirty-nine like his hero Hilarion, cut down in full sunlight.

A masterpiece of Haitian literature, whose hero's tragic fate eerily prefigures that of his creator.