Childhood

Award-winning author of Texaco, Patrick Chamoiseau is one of the most impressive, and versatile, novelists writing in French today. His autobiographical memoir, Childhood, sustains and extends that reputation, painting a vivid, poetic evocation of his upbringing in the slums of Fort-de-France, Martinique. Wrestling with the meaning of childhood--does it ever end?--Childhood depicts how we "never depart" from that "sensitive state", but repress it as we "start to believe in reality". For Chamoiseau, childhood stories are all about memory, how they connect what is momentary and passing to what is real, how they make vivid what tends to dim and disappear, and in his memoir he acts as a chorus remembering the countless struggles of his formidable mother, Ma Ninotte, for survival. In telling her story and the story of the house he grew up in, he also tells his own story and, more generally, of how the past verifies the present, how childhood becomes a profoundly necessary story for each generation to repeat or risk losing forever. At the close of his second, and final section--"Leaving"--he writes of his "guardianship" of that "fragile archive of our childhood yore", for in remembering it, it lives on. --David Marriott