Ready to Burst [Paperback]

Ready to Burst follows the lives of two young men and their individual attempts to make sense of the deeply troubled society surrounding them. An informed critique of the “brain drain” prompted by the Duvalier dictatorship, Ready to Burst is, in Frankétienne’s words, a portrait of “the extreme bitterness of doom in the face of the blind machinery of power.” Widely recognized as Haiti’s most important literary figure and an outspoken challenger of political oppression, Frankétienne was a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. The New York Times has called Frankétienne “the Father of Haitian Letters.” A Haitian novel about friendship, politics and artistic theory....  Frankétienne writes with a savage beauty about politics, art, and the roles of men and women in a turbulent world.   — Kirkus Reviews

Ready to Burst is a gorgeous, explosive book filled to the brim with genius and fantasy, with surreal dreams and memories. Open it anywhere and it will astonish you. — Amy Wilentz, Chicago Tribune

The relationship between Raynand and his friend Paulin, a novelist obsessed with Spiralist ideology, is central. Paulin is writing a novel himself and it bears remarkable similarities to Ready To Burst. In other hands, this meta-staging of a drama amid a literary manifesto might risk a descent into pomposity and obfuscation, but Frankétienne has a deftness of touch pleasingly reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño. In Glover’s fine translation we can only hope that the “Father of Haitian Letters” will flS0