The writer Carl Vausier is haunted by the departure of his wife and that of his daughter, from whom he has not heard for weeks. On his desk, the pages remain desperately blank, while all traces of inspiration and creativity seem to have deserted the novelist, yet one of the most famous in Haiti.
When he is no longer able to invent stories, he receives a visit from Milcent, the one-eyed man from the neighborhood, who bursts into his home in Port-au-Prince with a few armed men to demand his eye back, which he accuses the author of having stolen from him. A few years earlier, Carl Vausier had in fact published a botched short story in which a man named Milcent lost his eye following a kidnapping.
From then on, fiction meets reality, and the writer finds himself drawn into a series of situations as crazy as they are dangerous, in which a CIA spy who poses as a journalist, an alcoholic police inspector, a rapper who forces him to write the lyrics of his future radio hits and a pastor who collects on paper the sins of his faithful to sell them to the highest bidder.
Just reading this inventive premise, we guess that Gary Victor (Damn education [2012], Adrien’s violin [2023]) — unlike his character — must not often be a victim of writer’s block. Endowed with an unbridled imagination coupled with an absolutely delectable verve, the Haitian novelist offers with The Blank Pages of Distress a dizzying and intelligent dive into the chaos, beliefs, injustices and violence of a Haitian society eaten away by misery and despair.
A powerful political and social satire, the novel features larger-than-life characters who all represent, each in their own way, minorities – gangsters, clerics, police officers, crooks – who, hungry for power, take advantage of the collapse of society. State to establish their violence, line their pockets and turn the misfortunes of others to their own advantage.
Full of magical realism and echoes of Haitian spiritual life, the work is shot through with unexpected extravagances and fascinating narrative twists which, in addition to providing tension, give the book the feel of an adventure story.
As funny as it is lucid, Gary Victor’s prose is as unpredictable and complex as the society it describes, slipping into the different districts of the capital in a completely immersive way, highlighting the unique colors of each one along the way.
All of this is delivered with a scathing humor by a protagonist who is as macho as he is melancholic and who, like the distress that his characters breathe in to escape the torpor of everyday life, pushes back into an ephemeral fog the suffering that soaks reality.