Carnival

November 15, 2004
Struggling with the writer's life in New York City, ashamed of his wealthy West Indian upbringing and confused about his sexual orientation, William Fletcher is the smart, self-pitying narrator of this promising though unfocused novel, Antoni's third (Divina Trace
; Blessed Is the Fruit
). When William bumps into his old friend Laurence, once a poor island boy, now an Oxford-educated poet and playwright, and then into Rachel, his second cousin and first love, the trio hatch a plan to return to their native Trinidad to celebrate Carnival. For all the debauchery that is Carnival (think Scotch, marijuana, fireworks, jouvert
bands), this section of the novel feels curiously bloodless, perhaps because Antoni's style tends toward short fragments ("He sat up, arms folded over chest. Breathing quickly. His chest rising, falling. Staring down at the ground") and weak transitions ("Before I had a chance to think about it..."; "Before I knew it..."; etc.) The final act of the novel shifts to a remote, mountainous region where William and friends intend to sober up from the merrymaking, but instead find themselves involved in a violent incident involving the Earth People (an isolated settlement of rastas) and a racist police force. Antoni's major themes—race (William is white, Laurence black, Rachel French-Creole) and sexuality—are good ones, but they're not sufficiently developed, and the plot feels somewhat manufactured. Agent, Kim Witherspoon.

October 15, 2004
All various shades of Creole, three friends getting reacquainted in New York vow to return to Trinidad for Carnival. Antoni's Divina Trace won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. With an eight-city author tour.

Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2005
Celebrated Caribbean writer Antoni excels at confounding expectations. Here his title suggests festivity, but what ensues is a shattering tale of deep-rooted class and racial conflicts erupting into vindictive violence. William, the hard-drinking white West Indian narrator, a floundering New York-based writer, always returns to Trinidad at carnival time, but this year, he is unexpectedly reunited with Laurence, who is black and a gloriously successful, jet-setting writer, and Rachel, William's second cousin and the love of his life, although their ardor is thwarted by his impotency. Seeking escape from their sorrows, they give themselves over to the bewitching calypso beat and cathartic abandon of the carnival. But when Rachel initiates a brazenly public interracial relationship with the King of the Carnival, all hell breaks lose. A master at simultaneously erotic and menacing descriptions, a choreographer of chaos, a storyteller with a cosmic sense of natural forces and human perversity, and a literary trickster who has boldly recast Hemingway's " The Sun Also Rises" as a harrowing tale of the unhealed wounds of the Caribbean, Antoni considers the crushing cost of survival in a cruelly divisive world and reveals a chilling truth: sometimes love is not enough.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)