The Drifting of Spirits

#223
Title: The Drifting of Spirits
Author: Gisèle Pineau
Publisher: Quartet Books
Year: 1993/1999 (tr.)
Country: Guadalupe
254  pages

The appended essay on Créolité ("Afterword") notwithstanding, I didn't find The Drifting of Spirits compelling or especially interesting. Perhaps it was a translation issue, but I never felt emotionally engaged with any of the characters. They seemed more cartoonish than I was expecting as well. In this way it reminded me of many of Kim Stanley Robinson's books (such as the Mars trilogy). Also an award winner, Robinson has the same distanced style in which the characters, no matter how vividly they are described, retain a cool distance from the reader; his plots, like this one, sprawl and are unpredictable, forcing the reader to be passive in relation to the story. The message of The Drifting of Spirits seems to be that no matter how good or decent you are, evil will take you down. I don't mind the fatalism, but I am left thinking that if this was the point, it might be better served by a poem than a novel.