Sweet Undoings

February 27, 2023
Love and corruption drive Lahens’s elegant and spirited account of contemporary Port-au-Prince, Haiti (after Moonbath). The recent unsolved murder of judge Raymond Berthier has left his family adrift. His daughter, Brune, contemplates leaving Haiti, while his brother-in-law Pierre, a gay man who spent much of his life away from the island, sets out to discover the motive and the culprits behind Berthier’s assassination despite the risk to his own safety. Brune and Pierre are at the center of a convivial social circle that includes rebellious student Ézéchiel, agronomist Waner, feminist Nerline, American researcher Ronny, and Parisian newcomer Francis. But the group’s effort may be compromised by the very ties that hold them together. Brune’s lawyer boyfriend Cyprien, once a student of Raymond’s, is working for some bad people, convinced in his ambition that “the city is a cauldron and you’ve got to reach for the froth if you don’t want to end up scraping the bottom”; and Ézéchiel’s boisterous friend Jojo may be more than just a neighborhood big shot. The vivid scenes of joyful nightlife and passionate desire are shot through with moments of harrowing danger and sadness. Lahens offers readers a memorable tableau. Agent: Alice Tassel, French Publishers Agency.

March 15, 2023
This novel, set in Haiti, follows several lives in the wake of an unsettling event. From the earliest pages of Lahens' novel, there's a profound sense of absence. It opens with a letter written by Raymond Berthier, a judge in Port-au-Prince, to his wife. Raymond has taken a stand against corruption, for which he has been threatened. "Naming certain things has become a criminal offense, though the fact that such things exist has not," he writes--and by the time the novel picks up, Raymond is presumed dead and the novel is now following Cyprien, who is in a relationship with Raymond's daughter, Brune, a musician. Lahens moves from character to character, some with deep connections to Raymond and others more distanced from him. Raymond's brother-in-law, Pierre--whom Raymond called "the most solid, the most lucid of us all"--emerges as the center of the book. At one point, Pierre evocatively revisits the recent history of his country: "It was at that exact time that the island began falling apart in their hands. Bit by bit. Like a car abandoned on the side of the road." There's also a subplot involving a man named Joubert, characterized by violence and cynicism: "Joubert abruptly takes his gun from beneath the bed and aims it at the TV set. A pain-in-the-ass activist for some obscure cause is talking about victims who deserve justice and reparation." This is a slow-burning and empathic work. Lahens occasionally shifts the book from third person to first for a passage or two, creating a sense of these disparate lives overlapping in unexpected ways. This is a book in which violence is never far away, but in which there's also room for hard-earned epiphanies. Lahens' latest turns its contradictions into the stuff of compelling drama.

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