The World Is Moving Around Me: A Memoir of the Haiti Earthquake

(Paperback)

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Description

On January 12, 2010, novelist Dany Laferriere has just ordered dinner at a Port-au-Prince restaurant with a friend when the earthquake struck. He survived, but some 300,000 others did not. The quake caused widespread disruption and left over one million homeless; it also revealed flaws in the impoverished nation's infrastructure that will take a generation from which to recover. This moving and revelatory book is an eyewitness account of the quake and its aftermath.

Reviews

Keen observation, incisive analysis and passionate engagement mark this author's account of the 2010 earthquake that devastated his native Haiti ... Through vignettes that range from a paragraph to a couple of pages, novelist Laferrire delivers a knockout punch through prose favoring matter-of-fact understatement over sentimental histrionics. --Kirkus Reviews (STARRED REVIEW)

Laferrire has a lucid plain-style which may remind American readers of the best of Ernest Hemingway, specifically Hemingway's commitment to writing about the actions that produce emotions, rather than about feelings themselves ... The glimpses Laferriere records of people on the devastated streets of Port-au-Prince accrue to give a deeper substance to the idea of Haitian indomitability. --Slate.com

A compelling firsthand account with cleverly crafted imagery and skilfully interwoven narrative strands about a country shook to its bare bones, fighting to defeat the shadow of death ... Just as T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is made up of seemingly disjointed images that work together to create a whole, so too is Laferrire's memoir. It is this 'heap of broken images' - to borrow Eliot's words - that are held together by the strongest thread of all: culture. --ARC magazine

Laferrire has written not only a valuable book but also a necessary one, a slim but potent volume reminding us that the people of Haiti deserve far better than the cards handed to them by fate ... In a just world, this book will excite renewed passion for helping Haiti and also a large audience for Laferrire himself, a talented writer who deserves a wide readership. --National Post

The World is Moving Around Me is unpretentious, starkly honest and good-humoured. Laferrire, a prize-winning novelist in the francophone literary world, is a masterful writer and his memoir, told in a clear and simple voice beautifully rendered by translator David Homel, is true to his vision of the essential role of culture, 'the only thing that can stand up to the earthquake ... intellectual culture [and] what structures a nation. If we don't want to turn into a victim nation, we have to keep moving. We'll cry later when things are better.' --The Globe and Mail

Author Bio

Dany Laferrire was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1953. He is the author of fourteen novels, including I Am a Japanese Writer, Heading South and the award-winning How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired. Laferrire's awards include the Prix Carbet and the Governor General's Literary Award.

David Homel was born and raised in Chicago in 1952. He has been a journalist, editor, literary translator, and teacher, and has won numerous awards for translation, including the Governor General's Award for Literature, Canada's highest literary honor.