Tropic of Violence

Starred review from March 2, 2020
Orphaned gang members and desperate refugees live on a machete’s edge in Appanah’s blistering depiction (after Waiting for Tomorrow) of postcolonial chaos in Mayotte, an island in the Mozambique channel. A carousel of first-person narrators recount the abrupt life story of Möise, abandoned as a baby and taken in by Marie, a white nurse in Mayotte. After Marie dies, the teenage Möise’s simmering identity crisis leads him into the island’s unforgiving slum, a “violent no-man’s land” called Gaza. There, the book-loving Möise, who names his dog after the author Henri Bosco, falls sway to gang leader Bruce, whose child soldiers run Gaza’s economy by drug dealing, burglary, and political graft. Marked as a middle-class interloper, Möise is ripe for Bruce’s exploitation. The calamitous chain of events that follows is narrated from beyond the grave by players who are helpless to change it and can only affirm its inevitability. “This country turns us all into beings who do wrong,” Marie says in her ghostly narration. A journalist and native Mauritian, Appanah has a knack for reportorial detail that crystallizes the characters’ commentary. Seen from above, present-day Mayotte is adrift in its own history, neglected by France, its parent state; at ground level it’s bloodstained and redolent with “sour urine on street corners, ancient shit in the gutters, chicken being grilled on top of oil drums, eau de cologne and spices outside the houses, the sour sweat of men and women and musty reek of laundry.” Appanah skillfully lets these perspectives merge in the short, brutal lives of her characters. This heralds Appanah as an essential cosmopolitan voice.

Starred review from April 1, 2020

After two recent stunners, The Last Brother and Waiting for Tomorrow, the Mauritian-born, French-based Appanah returns to cement her reputation as a leading world writer. The setting is Mayotte, an island in the Mozambique Channel (and a d�partment of France) suffering from the poverty and violence that seem inevitably a legacy of postcolonialism. Outspoken nurse Marie, separated from her husband and desperate for a child, accepts a baby with bicolored eyes shoved at her by a superstitious refugee. She names him Mo�se and raises him lovingly but dies when he is a teenager, her spirit remaining to help narrate the tragedy that unfolds in this multivoiced work. Joined by his beloved dog, the gentle Mo�se ends up in a corrosively ugly slum called Gaza with a children's gang led by the cruel and bullying Bruce. VERDICT Appanah's heartrending, insightful story makes us understand--and feel--the steps leading toward bloody confrontation in this relentless world.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 1, 2020
A teenage boy navigates a life of poverty and brutality on the island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean. Mo�se is barely 14 when his adoptive mother, Marie, suddenly dies. They live on the tropical island of Mayotte, officially a "department" of France. Every year, scores of undocumented immigrants--from the Comoro Islands, Africa, and elsewhere--wash up on Mayotte's shores in small boats known as kwassa-kwassas. That's how Mo�se's birth mother arrived. One night, she appeared in the hospital where Marie worked as a nurse, handed over her baby, and disappeared. In her latest novel, Appanah (Waiting for Tomorrow, 2018, etc.) interrogates difficult truths about immigration, class, poverty, and race and doesn't settle for any easy answers. After Marie dies, Mo�se falls from a middle-class life to one of desperation. He turns to a local shantytown and a brutal gang leader known as Bruce. In short, lyrically vivid chapters, Appanah alternates from one character's point of view to another's--some of them, like Marie, speaking from beyond the grave. "I used to think," Mo�se explains, "that on the day when I discovered the truth about my birth, something in my head would click into place." Things don't work out that way. Appanah, who was born in Mauritius and now lives in France, has written a crucial, timely novel. In it, she shows that beyond all the good intentions of the well-meaning lies a seething, anguished world that will require more than a few NGOs to recover. Mo�se is just one of its victims. Searing, lyrical, and ultimately devastating, Appanah's latest novel might be her finest yet.

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Starred review from April 1, 2020
How can a story so harrowing, so wrenching be so gorgeous? In her third novel exquisitely translated by award-winning Geoffrey Strachan, Mauritius-born journalist and translator Appanah (Waiting for Tomorrow, 2018) presents the beginning and dissolution of a boy, Mo�se, and all the people who, La Ronde-style, nurture, enable, and destroy him. Each slim chapter bears the name, including Mo�se's, of those responsible for the his existence on Mayotte, a d�partement of France in the Indian Ocean riddled with illegal immigration and stifling poverty. French nurse Marie didn't give Mo�se life, but she provided legal status, a safe home, unconditional love. Abandoned by his teenage mother, who washed up on unfriendly shores, Mo�se reciprocally saved Marie, who had been driven almost insane by her longing for a child. But at 13, Mo�se is suddenly alone when Marie dies. By 15, Mo�se is a murderer sitting in a jail cell after shooting the slum's vicious gang leader; corpse he may be, but Bruce gets his say in revealing his brutal rise to becoming the king of Gaza. Police officer Olivier, to whom Mo�se confesses, wants to save the boy, and temporary aid-worker St�phane's white-savior complex induces him to think that he will save the boy. Eloquent, horrifying, surreally relevant, Violence proves revelatory.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)