Eve out of her Ruins, a novel by Ananda Devi, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, (Deep Vellum /US, Gallimard/FR) is long-listed for the Albertine Prize, a reader’s choice award. Albertine booksellers have selected ten of the best French novels translated into English in the past year; US-based readers can vote between March 16 and April 30th here.

KAIAMA  L. GLOVER on Eve out of her Ruins by Ananda Devi

Four narrators and one small and devastating story they share and suffer together – these are the foundations of Ananda Devi’s devastating triumph of a novel, Eve Out of Her Ruins. Ruins are everywhere in Devi’s tale – in the bleak neighborhoods of Port Louis, Mauritius and in the hearts and souls of so many of the characters who live there. And yet, both the landscape and its inhabitants bear witness to beauty. The island can, if only precariously, be unbound by the imagination. And this refusal to be bound – this possibility of dreaming beyond and elsewhere – is the light within the ruins Devi has built for us. Rooting for Eve, Saad, Savita, and Clélio, we readers can only believe they will outrun or outsmart or outlive the violent and indifferent beings who mean to destroy them. Yet we know, too, the unlikelihood of their triumph. Eve Out of Her Ruins is exhilarating in the intensity of the “hope, despite…” it both reveals and inspires.

Translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Deep Vellum (US), Gallimard (FR).

Kaiama L. Glover received a B.A. in French History and Literature and Afro-American Studies from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in French and Romance Philology from Columbia University. She is now an associate professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her book, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, explores the Haitian Spiralist movement. She sits on the editorial boards of the Romanic Review and Small Axe and regularly contributes to The New York Times Book Review. In addition to Dance on the Volcano, she has translated Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst (Archipelagos 2013) and René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams (Akashic 2017), and has been awarded fellowships from The National Endowment for the Humanities, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Fulbright Foundation, The Mellon Foundation, and the New York Public Library.