Master of the Crossroads

Continuing his epic trilogy of the Haitian slave uprising, Madison Smartt Bell's Master of the Crossroads delivers a stunning portrayal of Toussaint Louverture.
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The plot is almost as complex as the characters themselves, which is why they are so amazingly lifelike. Dramatic, funny, horrifying, and compelling. This is a historical fiction book -something that is very popular right now - but it is not done in the traditional manner. Toussaint Louverture lead the only successful slave revolt in history and though this book is set during that time it choses not to make that fact it's main focus.

Instead this literary novel uses secondary characters and subplots to tell a larger story about the decline of French colonialism in Haiti and the change that wrought on the island nation. The problem is that it d This is a historical fiction book -something that is very popular right now - but it is not done in the traditional manner.

The problem is that it didn't really work for me. Louverture is relegated to a minor role despite the fact that his actions are the driving force of the book. When Louverture does something everyone is affected but these game shifting events are almost referred to as an aside instead of given the weight of there importance.


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The few, brief appearances that he makes left not really understanding his motives or realizing him as the major historical figure that he is. The book is formed more by the rise of voodoo as practiced by the freed slaves and the threat that poses to the entrenched religion of Catholicism practiced by the former slave-owning white class. From here Smartt Bell explores the differences between the many different ethnicities that form the now free island.

But I never felt the tensions inherent in these conflicts of old world vs new society and much like Louvertures' military efforts it seemed to something that happened in the distance.

More an inconvenience than a social upheaval. I felt I was being feed information rather than being drawn in by these events. This is mostly due to the ghostly presence of Louverture who only seems to appear when necessary to keep the history correct despite that he is the decision maker in everything that happens.

This book does have it's strengths. Written in a literary style that doesn't insult the reader with a scholarly understanding of Haitian life during colonial times is admirable. And the different points of view and the use of local dialect add a depth to the book but the long gaps between narratives left me confused and lost in the characters subplots. And the conflicts, in part, never really delivered because of this leaving the larger story of a new society finding it's place among it's former oppressors underwritten. The secondary stories overwhelmed me and though they draw a detailed sketch of life during these times they failed to produce the big picture this book deserved.

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Probabilmente lo scopriremo nel terzo volume, Il Napoleone nero strana traduzione italiana dell'originale The Stone That the Builder Refused , la biblica "pietra scartata dai costruttori". Accanto a queste intricate vicende politico-militari, proseguono quelle private della folla di personaggi che abbiamo incontrato nel primo volume, sballottati da un posto all'altro dal susseguirsi dei capovolgimenti e dei ribaltamenti di fronte.

Domani comincio l'ultima puntata. Spero in un finale in crescendo. Maybe my high expectations for the second part got the best of me but this was genuinely a huge letdown. I will read the last book in the trilogy because the good parts this book were really good and I got attached to the characters.

The bad parts though were really bad. He said in 5 pages what could have been said in one, drew out a lot of scenes and it was very distracting constantly referencing the glos Just o. He said in 5 pages what could have been said in one, drew out a lot of scenes and it was very distracting constantly referencing the glossary. Jul 04, Rachelfm rated it really liked it Shelves: This book is dense and intense, demanding a lot from the reader keeping French and Creole slang straight and managing a pretty complex cast of characters against a rapidly changing historical backdrop.

The investment of energy and intellectual effort to understand Haiti c. I didn't find it to be transcendent, but I feel certainly more well educate This book is dense and intense, demanding a lot from the reader keeping French and Creole slang straight and managing a pretty complex cast of characters against a rapidly changing historical backdrop.

I didn't find it to be transcendent, but I feel certainly more well educated having read it. Apr 11, Anne rated it really liked it.

Master of the Crossroads by Madison Smartt Bell | leondumoulin.nl

It took a while for me to get hooked on the second of Bell's trilogy about the slave uprising that created the country of Haiti, formerly France's colony Saint Dominique. But once I did I again could not put his novel down. The military maneuverings were fascinating and at times horrifying. What I really enjoyed about the novel was the personalities and exploits of the characters involved with the military. Fascinating characters and narrative Bell continued to navigate the complex history of the Haitian route to independence, masterfully telling the story through his choice of characters.

Riau is one of my favorites, and I look forward to seeing his life develop. An epic meant to savor. Dec 07, Jessie rated it it was amazing. This is the second of the series and better written than the first. I loved getting to know the main characters in these books - especially the slave Rouau who leads a double existence - and watching them change and deepen over time. I felt like they were my close friends by the end of the trilogy, as did my cousin, who also loved the series.

Jun 12, K. The bits of information he possessed lay quietly in his mind, like seeds. Toussaint passes through the crossroads of countries and races, assuming the role of hero, traitor, criminal, slave, husband, general, father, pagan and Catholic. This befits the name he created and adopted, literally Toussaint of the Opening, a subtle invocation of Legba, the vodou god who guides people through crossroads. Bell incorporates into the character of Toussaint the few known historical facts.

A diminutive man who nonetheless possessed "a strange, compelling dignity," Toussaint needed little sleep and, amid Haiti's shifting alliances, focused on liberating his country and his people. However, Haiti is a more vivid presence in these pages than its liberator, who remains remote throughout, his motivations never revealed. Even his brother-in-law says, "I don't suppose there's anyone who knows his mind. Hebert, a grand blanc propertied Frenchman , serves as rational witness to the colony's horrors.

Nanon, his black mistress, is the life force of Haiti, seductive and powerful. Choufleur, a mulatto, is driven by hate for both blacks and whites for excluding him. That would seem to lead him on to independence, but that move is fraught with dangers and likely to lead to long-lasting foreign wars from all sides and bitter and destructive internal disputes. Perhaps it is not Toussaint who is ambiguous. Rather, it is the historical situation in which he lived and fought which offered no real solution and Toussaint was simply doomed to push forward into this hopeless morass of history. Thus I see Bell's Toussaint as essentially a confusion and frustration to himself, wanting a utopia which history is busily denying him.

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The brilliance and delight of Bell's novel is the presentation of the evidence -- the evidence is the novel itself, nearly pages of fascinating people living their lives in Saint-Domingue when all things revolved around the moves, hopes and ambitions of Toussaint Louverture.

I criticized that novel for having brilliant fictional characters, but a less vivid portrait of Toussaint himself, the seeming central character. I now think that criticism was misguided. Herbert, white French physician who eventually faces up to the prejudices of his time and marries his mulatto lover, Nanon; Tocquet, gutsy French gun-runner and middle man who will sell anything to anyone, knowing no loyalties; the witty and sexy Madame de Cigny who bears a black man's child, but lacks the courage to accept the child as her own; the evil and warped mulatto Choufleur who fights a deadly hand-to-hand battle with Dessalines; the delightful child-like Moustique, son of a Catholic priest who was killed off in volume one, who grows to adopt his father's Catholicism while adapting it to include the Guinee mysteries as well and on and on and on.

The cast of significant characters is long and one person is more real, vivid and memorable than the next. Each character is vibrant, alive, convincing, lovable or hateful, amusing or disgusting in turn. What is central is that each is somehow related to Toussaint and reveals a different aspect of Toussaint's person.

The melange is to lay bare a Toussaint whom we experience through the other characters. The sum is contradictory, of course, thus the Toussaint who emerges is complex, confused, indecisive and a victim of circumstances.

I missed this aspect of the structure of the novel first time round. Toussaint is the complete center of this novel, but Toussaint is not revealed by his acts nor the power of his own fictional person. Rather, he is revealed in the lives of the many developed fictional characters and in their understanding of Toussaint in his dealings toward them and Saint-Domingue. Were there a clear REAL Toussaint in the historical literature he would have been laid naked to us by now in the analyses of historical research.

Bell's valuable contribution is to make the Toussaint of essential ambiguity live for us in the believable fictional characters of this novel.

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On one level the crossroads are the myriad moments of critical decision when Toussaint simply MUST decide. In the course of Bell's story he has several other crucial historical crossroads:. The second sense of the crossroads ties into its meaning within Voodoo. Again, as in the characterization itself, it is not in Toussaint that we see the theme played out, but in the fictional characters. Voodoo is at the center of Bell's account and three characters particularly emphasize the role of Voodoo in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue.

Toussaint himself remains aloof, even retreating more and more toward a fairly conservative version of Roman Catholicism, broken only by the hint that at times he may have been possessed by Ogun. But Moustique embraces Voodoo with passion. Moustique is his illegitimate son and Toussaint seeks to provide him with a good Catholic upbringing. He flees that safe world after discovering the African mysteries of his mother's side. As he grows through his teens he becomes increasingly at the center of a curious and thorough wedding of Catholicism and Voodoo, becoming a de facto if unordained Catholic priest as well as a dedicated houngan.

His versions of both Catholicism and Voodoo are seemingly idealized versions of quite late 20th century values of love and fellowship, but no matter, he sweeps people into his vision and serves both communities.

Master of the Crossroads

Riau, again in this volume as well as the first, my favorite character, is a former slave whom Toussaint knew at Breda when Riau was but a child. In ALL SOULS' he went into Toussaint's army, learned to read and write, became a captain in the army with a blood-thirsty love of white blood and one of Toussaint's trusted secretaries. Eventually he simply tired of the war and went into marronage, and more important, desertion of Toussaint's army.