The Bridge of Beyond in The Roundtable

Dec 14, 2021 Irene rated it really liked it

This is the story of 4 generations of women living in a community which has inherited the scars of slavery. This is a story of poverty, domestic violence, sexual assault, the struggle to know one’s worth. And this is a story of the strength of love, of wisdom passed through the generations, of simple yet profound dignity, of beauty at the deepest level. The language was rich and lyrical, the characters well rendered, the imagery creatively conveyed.

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Apr 24, 2018 Elise rated it it was amazing

Shelves: women, fiction, translated, favorites, 1970s, read-in-2018

A matrilineal family history set on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. Telumee narrates vignettes from the lives of her great-grandmother down the generations to her own. The women are haunted by betrayals, ancestral ghosts, and the memory of slavery, but this is also a novel of perseverance and nature’s beauty. When reviews praise a book as lyrical, this is usually a warning that I’ll find the prose twee and overwrought, usually with indiscriminate use of adjectives, but Schwarz-Bart has a tru ...more

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Jul 30, 2019 El rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-centurylit-late, cultural-studies-and-other, library-borrow, hear-me-roar-and-gender

In this slim novel, Telumee tells her difficult story about growing up in Guadalope. It's her story, but also the women in her life - her mother, the other women in the village. Slavery, colonialism, motherhood, family, love... it's all here. It's a slim novel (my copy is only 173 pages) but there's so much that happens here that it's hard to read in just one sitting, even as the prose flies across the page. Time is funky in this story, uneven, and yet it somehow lends itself well to this dreamy In this slim novel, Telumee tells her difficult story about growing up in Guadalope. It's her story, but also the women in her life - her mother, the other women in the village. Slavery, colonialism, motherhood, family, love... it's all here. It's a slim novel (my copy is only 173 pages) but there's so much that happens here that it's hard to read in just one sitting, even as the prose flies across the page. Time is funky in this story, uneven, and yet it somehow lends itself well to this dreamy atmosphere that Schwarz-Bart created in her novel.

Woe to him who laughs once and gets into the habit, for the wickedness of life is limitless: if it gives you your heart's desire with one hand, it is only to trample on you with both feet and let loose on you that madwoman bad luck, who seizes and rends you and scatters your flesh to the crows.
(p11)

She tells us about the landscape - what Telumee sees, smells, hears, feels. All of the senses are put to work with this novel.

We walked in silence, slowly, my grandmother so as to save her breath and I so as not to break the spell. Towards the middle of the day we left the little white road to its struggle against the sun, and turned off into a beaten track all red and cracked with drought. Then we came to a floating bridge over a strange river where huge locust trees grew along the banks, plunging everything into an eternal blue semidarkness. My grandmother, bending over her small charge, breathed contentment: 'Keep it up, my little poppet, we're at the Bridge of Beyond.' And taking me by one hand and holding on with the other to the rusty cable, she led me slowly across that deathtrap of disintegrating planks with the river boiling below.
(p27)

What Telumee learns, we learn. We are one with the Guadalupean women. It may be an environment and a culture unfamiliar to many of us, but the truths are the same. I felt that on just about every page.

'My little ember,' she'd whisper, 'if you ever get on a horse, keep good hold of the reins so that it's not the horse that rides you.' And as I clung to her, breathing in her nutmeg smell, Queen Without a Name would sigh, caress me, and go on, distinctly, as if to engrave the words on my mind: 'Behind one pain there is another. Sorrow is a wave without end. But the horse mustn't ride you, you must ride it.'
(p51)

I haven't annotated a book this much in a long while. So much spoke to me, the way a woman being treated inappropriately appears to be universal, for one thing.

Trouble is something that takes you by surprise - a tick that jumps on you and sucks you to the last drop of your blood. At my age, and by no means ignorant, I'd thought myself safe from this sort of attack, but for all our experience we know no more about life than we do about death.
(p72)

Racism:

He spent all his time now warding off invisible blows, which apparently these people strike at you without even thinking. However much he straightened his hair, parted it on one side, bought a suit and a hat, he still went through an invisible avalanche of blows in the street, at work, in restaurants. People didn't notice his efforts, didn't see he had to change everything, for in a Negro what part is good? That's what Amboise asked himself during his seven years' stay in France. He could never say what took place inside him, and how by the end of the seven years he had come to regard white men as mouths that cram themselves with misfortune, burst bladders that set themselves up as lanterns to light the world.
(p150)

Mysticism:

One night he appeared to me in a dream and asked me to help him join the dead - he was not properly one of them yet, because of me, just as because of him I was not properly living. He wept and implored, saying I must keep up my position as a Negress to the end. The next day I cut three wands of acacia and went down to the graveyard at La Ramee, and I whipped [his] grave, beat it and whipped it.
(p155)

Coming-of-age:

...I believed in a little girl who left me; and yet without quite knowing why, I don't regard any of all that as a waste of time. It may well be that all suffering, even the prickles in the canefields, are part of the glory of man, and it may well be that looking at it in a certain way, from a certain angle, I may one day be able to grant a certain beauty to Angel Medard.
(p169)

This book really speaks for itself. It's a hidden gem - I say "hidden" because until recently, I had never heard of it. But it's lovely. It's touching, it's heartbreaking, it's beautiful.

As I struggled others will struggle, and for a long time yet people will know the same sun and moon; they will look at the same stars, and, like us, see in them the eyes of the dead.
(p172-3)

...more

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