Maril猫ne Phipps-Kettlewell鈥檚 award-winning stories transport you to Haiti鈥攖o a lush, lyrical, flamboyant, and spirit-filled Haiti where palm trees shine wet with moonlight and the sky paints a yellow screen over your head and the ocean sparkles with thousands of golden eyes鈥攁nd keep you there forever. Her singular characters mysteriously address the deeper meanings of human existence. They also dream of escape, whether from themselves, from family, from Vodou, from financial and cultural difficulties and the politicians that create them, or from the country itself, but Haiti will forever remain part of their souls and part of the thoughts of her readers.
Some characters do achieve escape through the mind or through sea voyage鈥攅scape found by surrendering to spectacular fantasies and madness and love, bargaining with God, joining the boat people. Marie-Ange Saint-Jacques鈥檚 mother sacrifices everything to insure her daughter鈥檚 survival on a perilous boat trip, Angelina waits to fly away to Nou Y貌k, Vivi creates her own circus with dozens of rescued dogs, Gustave dies a martyr to his faith. Throughout, the 鈥淚鈥 who moves in and out of these dream-filled stories embraces the heavenly mysteries found in 鈥渢he room where all things lost are stored with grace.鈥
We begin our journey to Haiti with images of a little girl in a candlelit bedroom reading a book about the life of Saint Bernadette, surrounded by the bewitching scents, sounds, and textures of a Caribbean night. Each story stands by itself, but some characters can be followed from one story to another through the transformations they undergo as a result of their life experiences. In this way, the collection can be read as one story, the story of a family trapped in a personal and cultural drama and the story of the people with whom the family interacts, themselves burdened by the need to survive within Haiti鈥檚 rigorously class-determined society and blessed by their relationship to the company of heaven in which they live and for which they are destined.
鈥淏rilliantly evocative contemporary stories about Haiti told by a personable native鈥 鈥攕tarred review, Kirkus Reviews
鈥淭hese are beautiful, richly textured stories; 鈥榩ainterly鈥 is the word that describes them best. What might be unbearable sadness after the devastation so recently suffered by Haiti becomes, in Maril猫ne Phipps-Kettlewell鈥檚 hands, a testament of hope and resilience, of spirit and celebration. Like the people they are about, these stories will last.鈥濃擧enry Louis Gates, Jr.
鈥淢aril猫ne Phipps-Kettlewell鈥檚 The Company of Heaven heralds the fiction debut of a brilliant and insightful storyteller. With the sensitivities of the poet and visual artist that she is, Phipps-Kettlewell brings us these lyrical, funny, quirky, and memorable stories from the Haiti of both near and far. A book not to be missed, The Company of Heaven takes us to both heaven and hell and many places in between, but always with innovation, honesty, and grace.鈥濃擡dwidge Danticat
鈥淩eading Maril猫ne Phipps-Kettlewell鈥檚 The Company of Heaven is like happening on a book of psalms transcribed from some secret, fantastic, harrowed heart, somehow mineralized into language and somehow preserved for us to read. I was struck again and again by the lyrical, lamented, 鈥榣ush but rotting鈥 but somehow also miraculously upheld world laid out before me. These stories are fraught and mysterious, and Phipps-Kettlewell鈥檚 art is to have preserved them so precisely in all their hard beauty.鈥濃擯aul Harding, author, Tinkers
鈥淲hen I first read Maril猫ne Phipps-Kettlewell鈥檚 short fiction for publication in Callaloo in 2002, I knew immediately that I was in the presence of an extraordinarily fertile imagination that would deliver on its promises: an arresting collection of short stories that would, with eloquence and elegance, keep all of us who encounter her lyricism wondering who we are in this postmodern world. With The Company of Heaven, she has delivered. Her answer is neither a formulaic fix nor an ideological bombast; her answer is itself a series of questions turned back on us鈥攓uestions that keep us returning at once to her ur-texts and also to our own lives as if they were metatexts.鈥濃擟harles Henry Rowell, editor, Callaloo
