Texaco

First edition, one of 50 numbered copies on vélin pur chiffon de lana, the only deluxe issue.

A fine copy, with a small nick at the head of the spine between the author's name and the title.

Presentation copy, inscribed by Patrick Chamoiseau to Maurice Marchaux: "... cette mémoire-langage qui invoque toutes les langues du monde. Avec mes amitiés créoles..." [this memory language invoking all of the world's languages] with a sketch formed from his initials.

The first Prix Goncourt awarded to a novel by a West Indian author since René Maran's Batouala in 1921, Texaco established Chamoiseau as the foremost figure of the Créolité movement. The author's interesting inscription recalls the singular relationship with language that animates this great Martinican epic, a true "agrégat interactionnel ou transactionnel, des éléments caraïbes, européens, africains, asiatiques, et levantins, que le joug de l'Histoire a réunis sur le même sol," as Chamoiseau had written in the Éloge de la créolité. The work inspired a glowing critical appreciation by Milan Kundera in L'Infini :

"[Chamoiseau] has taken with the French language a freedom that none of his contemporaries in France can even imagine daring to take. It is the freedom of a Brazilian writer with regard to Portuguese […]. Or, if you will, the freedom of a bilingual writer who refuses to grant absolute authority to either of his languages, and who finds the courage to disobey. Chamoiseau does not compromise between French and Creole by blending them. His language is French, though transformed; not creolised (no Martinican speaks like that) but chamoisé.""

Between history, testimony, and myth, Chamoiseau traces the sufferings endured in Martinique across three generations: first under slavery, then during the first wave of migration toward the City (Port-au-Prince's l'Enville), and finally in the present day.

A superb copy, exceptionally rare with an inscription on deluxe paper, of this landmark work of Antillean literature.