• The Bridge of Beyond
1 1

The Bridge of Beyond

The Bridge of Beyond

by Simone Schwarz-Bart, introduction by Jamaica Kincaid, translated from the French by Barbara Bray

$16.95
$0.00 $16.95
Available as E-Book French Literature International Literature
Format
This title can be purchased from your favorite e-book retailer,
including  many independent booksellers.

Buy on Amazon   Buy on iBooks   Buy on Barnes&Noble

This is an intoxicating tale of love and wonder, mothers and daughters, spiritual values and the grim legacy of slavery on the French Antillean island of Guadeloupe. Here long-suffering Telumee tells her life story and tells us about the proud line of Lougandor women she continues to draw strength from. Time flows unevenly during the long hot blue days as the madness of the island swirls around the villages, and Telumee, raised in the shelter of wide skirts, must learn how to navigate the adversities of a peasant community, the ecstasies of love, and domestic realities while arriving at her own precious happiness. In the words of Toussine, the wise, tender grandmother who raises her, “Behind one pain there is another. Sorrow is a wave without end. But the horse mustn’t ride you, you must ride it.”

A masterpiece of Caribbean literature, The Bridge of Beyond relates the triumph of a generous and hopeful spirit, while offering a gorgeously lush, imaginative depiction of the flora, landscape, and customs of Gua­deloupe. Simone Schwarz-Bart’s incantatory prose, interwoven with Creole proverbs and lore, appears here in a remarkable translation by Barbara Bray.by Simone Schwarz-Bart, introduction by Jamaica Kincaid, translated from the French by Barbara Bray

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590176801
Pages: 272
Publication Date:

Praise

It is like a fable in the form of a ballad, which is to say it is poetical but not always clear. Its languorous sense of ease, dangerously close to delusion, gives scope to Simone Schwarz-Bart's considerable gift for describing the trees and flowers of her native island.
—Paul Theroux, The New York Times

In a literary field saturated with messianic heroes, be they poetic or proletarian, The Bridge of Beyond plunges us into a fabulous story of women, the chronicle of a mythical line of matrons: the Lougandors. Yet something would be lacking if we saw it merely as, for example, a rewriting of [Jacques Roumain's] Masters of the Dew, where a family of women are playing their version of Manuel. In comparison with these pre-texts, Simone Schwarz-Bart innovates. She innovates by metamorphosing the Creole oral tradition.
—Maryse Conde

Her stories seem to gleam with the polish of re-telling and are a distillation of passion and experience in which every trace of whimsicality and affectation have been squeezed out by the knowledge of real suffering. The virtues are, of course, not [the character] Toussine's but the author's, but so natural is this that it is easy to forget that it is a work of fiction; it is a very fine achievement.
—The Irish Times

The book's gift of life is so generous, and its imagery so scintillant in the sunlight of love, that we believe every word.
—John Updike, The New Yorker

There's magic, madness, glory, tenderness, above all abundant hope.
—Financial Times

The language ... is as luxuriant as the foliage of the Antilles.
—The Times (London)

View full details

  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 

  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 

  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it