Ready to Burst

by

Translated from by

Published: October 2014

$9.99$18.00

ISBN: N/A

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“The ‘burst’ in Ready to Burst, also announces the eruption onto the scene of one of literature’s great figures […] a magician of technique and feeling, in the tradition of a great family of writers like James Joyce, João Guimarães Rosa et Osman Lins.” — Rafael Lucas in his preface to the 2004 French edition of Ready to Burst

 

 

Ready to Burst reads…with an energy akin to the charged manifestos of the Italian Futurists. — The Daily Beast

 

“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

 


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Book Description

Ready to Burst tells the tale of a young man’s efforts to navigate the challenges of a deeply troubled society. The novel moves fluidly between his experiences and those of his alter ego, opening a window onto the absurd realities of a dictatorship. First published in 1968, Ready to Burst presents a sensitive critique of François Duvalier’s suffocating regime and its consequences for a generation of young people in Haiti. The novel offers at once an exquisite verbal painting of life within a specific context of terror and a vivid exploration of love, hope, and the delicate membrane between reality and dream. 

Every day I use the dialect of lunatic hurricanes.
I speak the madness of clashing winds.
Every evening I use the patois of furious rains.
I speak the fury of waters in flood.

His work can speak to the most intellectual person in the society as well as the most humble. It's a very generous kind of genius he has, one I can't imagine Haitian literature ever existing without.

Edwidge Danticat


The "burst" in Ready to Burst, also announces the eruption onto the scene of one of literature's great figures [...] a magician of technique and feeling, in the tradition of a great family of writers like James Joyce, João Guimarães Rosa et Osman Lins.

Rafael Lucas in his preface to the 2004 French edition of Ready to Burst


Each of Frankétienne's words builds a world of which every Haitian dreams.

Emmelie Prophete, Haitian-American writer, Huffington Post


Frankétienne speaks like an educated man [...] but also like a friend and a citizen of the world at peace with himself and with others.

Annick Chalifour, l'Express.


It is Frankétienne's audacity in his writing - his charming ability to calmly bring his interlocutor into his initially terrifying world [...] which makes him such an incredible writer and persona.

Alessandra Benedicty, Huffington Post


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 [...] an impressive case-study -- a novel that is 'ready to burst' yet manages still to maintain a solid enough shape for readers to readily grasp it and what its author wishes to convey, in all its messy power.

The Complete Review


Ready to Burst marks the first, long overdue, appearance in the United States of the energetic founder of literary 'spiralism'[...] it consists of three at once intersecting and merging lives, and their single, compelling, intricately structured story is told in resourceful, oft-poetic language.

John Taylor, Arts Fuse


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


Ready to Burst reads...with an energy akin to the charged manifestos of the Italian Futurists.

The Daily Beast


This is an amazing revelation, a deep and meaningful read, lyrical, possessed, frightening, honest, shocking and gripping. A celebration of the written word, even a celebration of single words, yes experimental in form but enlightening in structure and style.

Messengers Booker


Frankétienne’s multiple narrators [...] are vividly imaginative, especially in their telling of brief, but terrible, incidents in their lives. [...] Kaiama L. Glover, the translator of Ready to Burst, met the significant challenge of this important writer.

Charles R. Larson, Counterpunch


Kaiama L. Glover’s choice to translate—brilliantly—this particular work may be seen as a gesture toward reconnecting Spiralism with the broader literary history of the Caribbean... In this masterfully controlled chaos of a novel, the quotidian and the exceptional rub elbows—and the autobiographical is often more surreal than the fictional.

Corine Stofle, Public Books


Watch Frankétienne in a 2011 PBS special, “In Chaos of Post-Earthquake Haiti, Artists Create Poetry Amid Rubble” :Screen shot 2014-08-15 at 12.21.32 PMRead Frankétienne’s interview in Haiti Business Week.

Check out blogger Kreyolicious’s list of 50 books every Haitian-American should read, including Ready to Burst, here.