Heading South

July 26, 2010
Laferrière's scintillating American debut recounts the sexual adventures of an eclectic cast of characters under the regime of "Baby Doc" Duvalier, charting their desire for sex and power as they navigate the complexities of life in 1970s Haiti. Roughly at the center is 17-year-old Fanfan, who enjoys seducing the bourgeois women who employ his seamstress mother. Elsewhere, Christina, wife of the American cultural attaché in Port-au-Prince, lives in self-imposed semi-isolation as her husband chases Haitian girls and her teenage daughter takes sexual advantage of the hired help. Meanwhile, women sex tourists from New York, London, Paris, and Boston awaken to lives that feel at once unreal and yet truer than anything back home. One of them, a
Parisian journalist, is tricked into marrying a voodoo god and becomes imprisoned on the island; another deserts her husband and children to live in a cottage with a farmer. In each storylike chapter, Laferrière reveals the workings of race, class, and colonialism in Haitian society and the manipulative sexual power that underlies it all.