Dany Laferriere was a journalist in Haiti when Papa Doc Cuvalier was in power. "When a colleauge was found murdered by a roadside, Laferriere took the hint and went into exile in Canada." He settled in Montreal, took a factory job and started writing this novel. Although it is fiction there are quite a few autobiographical details so we get an idea of the immigrant experience and also the black experiences in a predominately white culture.

The narrator is living in a squalid room on St-Denis with a view of the cross on top of Mont Royal. He shares this room with his friend Bouba who sleeps, plays jazz, reads the Koran and acts as a guru to a number of white women. It is a sweltering summer and, of course, there is no air conditioning in the apartment. The narrator has one steady girlfriend, a white rich girl referred to as Miz Literature, but also a few ancillary girls he takes to bed. The way he tells it the white girls like black men because they are so much better in bed than white men. However, that is not all there is to our hero. He reads voraciously and has a vast knowledge of modern and ancient literature. He also is nice to the women he is involved with. I never got a sense that he just saw them as sex objects alone; he genuinely likes them. There are a few misogynistic remarks about women that aren't beautiful but thinking of the times (the book was published in French in 1985) I'm sure most men probably felt the same. Ultimately the book is a celebration of life in a vibrant, multi-cultural city.

Despite the race preference espoused by the narrator of the book Laferriere himself is married to a black woman and that marriage has persisted for over forty years. Given that bit of knowledge I suspect that Laferriere wrote the book with tongue firmly planted in cheek, using a belief common among racist whites that black men just live to f**k. CBC picked this book as one of the 100 Novels that Make Us Proud to be Canadian and I think it was a good choice. ( )

This is one of those books with fantastic passages where the author let’s rip. Sometimes funny and often shocking. At one point my mouth was hanging open. But by the end of the book my teeth were gritted and I was repulsed and revulsed by the picture of people reduced below the level of humanity, each just a type and each type just a collection of desires. Life so small and so squalid. Art reduced to the acquisition of money and the appreciation of art defined by the type of person.

Not that this is a bad book. The author’s doing this on purpose. There’s literary quality here and it’s certainly effective. I appreciated it but didn’t enjoy it. ( )

Jazz, littérature et questions raciales. ( )

The narrator of this novella is a young Haitian man who is living in a dodgy apartment on the rue Saint-Denis in Montreal along with his African roommate Bouba, the "Black Buddha" of the city. He spends his days in his filthy and pest-ridden flat working on his first novel, Black Cruiser's Paradise, and his nights are generally spent in the company of his girlfriend Miz Literature, a privileged and attractive white literature student at McGill University, or in a variety of bars and cafés with other black émigrés, who discuss the plight of black men in the city and their never ending pursuit of white women, and vice versa.

Despite its short length I found this book to be tiresome and less than believable, filled with trivial discussions about literature, jazz and black-white relations in Montreal and in the United States. ( )

I love the `Motifs' series. The cover design is great.