A review by dylan2219
Tropic Death by Eric Walrond

challenging mysterious reflective slow-paced

4.0

fascinating, troubling, deeply strange. Feels dramatically ahead of its time, but also further evidence that much of Caribbean art + literature around this time was dramatically modern, indeed many people there were doing things way ahead of similar movements in Europe and the US. This is like tropical Dylan Thomas , or William Faulkner; very impressionistic, short, tense little sentences rich with sensory detail and wordplay. Many of the passages in this book are incredible, even when some of the stories don’t work super well, getting too carried away in the details. Like many other works from this period - esp in the Caribbbean -  it displays a fixation on race that I assume existed culturally at this time, but now reads as both cruel and bizarre, it gives a dark and gothic sensibility  to the way in which these islands have been shaped by colonisation and slavery, every person’s backstory has a complicated and often traumatic past that can be literally read on their body. You never get the sense Waldron is writing for anyone other than his own community, and also, is uninterested in playing into or responding to any preconceived ideas about the Caribbean and it’s people. It’s not realism - if anything it’s surreal - but it is not didactic, and you just have to get on the wavelength, which I’m so glad I did.