Robert AntoniBesprekingen

trinidad noir ....an interesting book....unlike any I have read. The short stories were often a bit strange...and felt very foreign. I found it was best to read only one or two at a time...and strangely, even though I wasn't sure I even liked the book, I'd find myself thinking about the stories later! So...an interesting read....even if I can't really say I 'enjoyed' it. I will say it was interesting and thought provoking!

This review really got away from me. I received and read this book about a week before I left for vacation in April, but decided I'd write the review when I got home. Then I forgot about it - not just the review, but the entire book itself! I saw it on my end table last week so I picked it and started reading. It wasn't until I started on the fourth story "Man-Man" that I remembered that I had already read this. I usually love this series but I found this entry underwhelming and unmemorable.

I like short stories when I travel, which is often. These were good but I usually read myself to sleep and these were pretty menacing for bed time stories.

If you follow my reviews for any length of time, you already know I am a fan of the Akashic Noir series. Trinidad Noir: The Classics, their newest release, came out on Monday. Just as in every other Akashic Noir anthology, it will introduce you to a place that you won't find in the travel books. Rougher than any Rough Guide, the Noir series introduces you to the sad places, the bad places, the places where people are often on the downside of power, on the no side of luck, and on the wrong side of the tracks. They are stories with heart and soul and struggle.

Trinidad Noir: The Classics contains 19 selection in four sections, Leaving Colonialism, Facing Independence, Looking In, and Losing Control. Like other Classics in the Noir series, the editors selected stories going back as far as 1927 to as recently as 2015. They include two poems in addition to the short stories.

People looking for more traditional noir mysteries will be disappointed. There's violence, crime, murder, but not the sort of whodunnits that overflow most mystery anthologies. The closest thing to a mystery is The Dragonfly's Tale by Sharon Millar that tells the story of a mother seeking her son who disappeared and the wife of a complicit bureaucrat who betrays her husband to help the mother find his body. Many of the stories involve magic traditions and folk spirits. Both the first and the last story feature supernatural answers to life's challenges. There are stories of colonial bigotry, racism and classism. There's also a lot of humor, sly tales of beggars, tricksters and cons. There's one story, Hindsight, that is little more than an extended scatological joke.

This is a varied collection of stories and I enjoyed several of them. Even those that were less satisfying were good stories. Overall, though, the collection feels unbalanced. There's too much of the trickster. Even The Bonnaire Silk Cotton Tree where there is a recitation of the many deaths and disappearance in the violence and the repression of that troubled island, the demon jumbie poses like a fashion model in a more humorous than frightening story even with the promise that all the dead from the first injustice to the wanton violence of today, from the indigenous slaughtered by colonialism, to the slaves, to those whose deaths come from poverty, theft, drugs, and all the other plagues, everyone who has never had justice would manifest for all to see. Theres is this flash of indignation, this demand for justice, but it is only a flash before the trickster is back. Then there is Hindsight, a slight, very short story that seems so much less than this anthology deserves, a self-effacing choice by editor Robert Antoni whose My Grandmother's Erotic Folktales offers several choices. In contrast, Earl Lovelace's story Joebell and America was one of my favorites.

There is an incomplete quality to many of the stories. For example, The Party, creates a sense of menace and dread, everything is laid for disaster and tragedy, and is then suspended, the story ends. It sets the mood for a story that is never told. I really want the rest of that story.

This was one of the stranger collections in the Akashic Noir series. There's more of the supernatural than usual. There is a lot of unseen, but deeply present, menace, powers that cannot be challenged and a sense that only humor keeps people from despair. With repressive government, murderous abusive police, corrupt businessmen with their private security, foreign investors, and criminal cartels, it seems that for most people, life is lived is in the margins, and they must laugh or die crying.

I was provided a promotional e-galley from the publisher through Edelweiss.

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/05/07/9781617754357/

What can I say about the Akashic Noir series that I haven't said before? Love them! And Trinidad Noir: The Classics was no exception.
While I enjoyed the stories in Parts I & II, as usual for me I struggled with the endings that I felt left me hanging or left me to draw my own conclusions. I prefer neat tidy bows at the end of my stories written by the author not left to my own imagination and I felt there was a lot of that in the first part of the book. It's just my personal preference. That being said nearly every story grabbed my attention and kept me engaged.
In Part III Uncle Zoltan by Ismith Khan & The Vagrant by Wayne Brown really stood out for their creative storylines.
I found my strongest connection with the stories in Part IV. Two of my favorites were The Party by Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw & Ghost Story by Barbara Jenkins. The Party was about a woman who was preparing for her young daughters birthday party amid the chaos of her marriage falling apart in a city filled with crime, drugs and kidnappings. Ghost Story really stood out for me. It was about a vagrant named Ghost who picks fruit from peoples trees without their permission and sells them to others. When the trees get infested with a disease the fruit dies off and he starts stealing from people and as a result gets shot. After recovering from the shooting he finds Jesus and later starts picking fruit to share with the community in a way in which to distribute the fruit evenly amongst the people benefiting everyone.

I enjoy the cadence and the sound of the English language in the mouths of the people of Trinidad and Tobago, so it was a pleasure to see it reproduced in so many of the stories in this collection.
The 'classics' refers to the most well-known of Trinidad's authors: VS Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, going as far back as a 1927 story by CLR James. The chronological sequence of the stories presents a picture of the changing people and society over the almost ninety years covered by the stories. In the older stories, male authors predominate, but women are well represented in the newer stories. The story of Trinidad must include the story of emigration, and one of my favorites is the 1957 story, The Cricket Match. Here, Samuel Selvon captures, with humor, Trinidadians in the London of the 1950s. This is the only explicit 'away' story, but others touch on characters with relatives who live elsewhere, or are trying to move away. However, most of all, the stories are of the people who live in that two-island nation.

TRINIDAD NOIR: THE CLASSICS is edited by Earl Lovelace and Robert Antoni.
It is a collection of reprints of classic stories and poems from celebrated Caribbean authors.
The editors are also the authors of two of the stories in this title. Publishing dates range from 1927 to 2015. While the stories “are not all focused on crime (a common element of the noir genre), they direct attention to the violence of a society that has not quite settled accounts with the casualties of enslavement and indentureship.”
The book contains a Table of Contents; an outline map of Trinidad Tobago showing where the various stories take place (I like this map); an Introduction; About the Contributors (very interesting profiles) and Permissions. There are 19 stories (and poems) divided into four parts: Part I - Leaving Colonialism; Part II - Facing Independence; Part III - Looking In; Part IV - Losing Control.
I quite liked the story LA DIVINA PASTORA by C.L.R. James, taking place in North Trace; originally published in 1927. This story was very eerie.
I read and reread the poem THE SCHOONER FLIGHT by Derek Walcott, taking place in the area of Blanchisseuse; originally published in 1979. “I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don’t work, I study the stars.”
THE PARTY by Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, taking place in the Santa Cruz Valley, first published in 2007. The story was one of desperation, sadness and terrible violence (boiling under the surface). From the ashes falling on the birthday cake to the seething bitterness of Alice to the rented pit bulls patrolling the yard - it was terribly depressing and scary.
Another story I liked (I really did like them all) was THE BONNAIRE SILK COTTON TREE by Shani Mootoo, originally published in 2015, taking place in Foothills, Northern Range. I was familiar with the author, Shani Mootoo, having just finished her book MOVING FORWARD SLOWLY LIKE A CRAB. I like her style and with characters like the attention-seeking priest, Father O’Leary, desperate for independence and acceptance, Nandita Sharma, and the sinister ‘jumbie’ - something disastrous is bound to happen.
I like the stories being in sequence according to publication. The reader can see a progression of sorts in the culture and character (and despair) of the emerging country.
Some of the stories were written in a regional patois which made it slow-going at times. But it added realism and character to the characters, the locale and the story line.
I like this noir series from Akashic Books very much. I thank Akashic Books for sending me this book in exchange for an unbiased and honest review. The title is part of Library Thing’s Early Review program.

Definitely a mixed bag. Definitely enjoyed it, and really like getting these ARC giveaways because they get me out of my type of novels I normally gravitate to. This collection of short stories by Trinidadian authors are printed chronologically by publication date, over the past century. Some of the stories I thought were pretty darn good; others were ho-hum. One note; I guess a large group of people on the island speak English, but in a very different dialect, so for people who don't like reading a lot of dialogue that's not in "proper" English, this will be a rough read.

It has a few poems included, but I don't enjoy poetry so I skipped over those completely; I'll edit my review if my wife reads them and lets me know what she thinks.

**I received a free copy of this book in exchange for this unbiased review.**

Robert Antoni’s new book was a very enjoyable read, with the added interest of using his family history as part of the story. This book has four different story tellers from different periods of time. At first I had a hard time understanding the layout and was a bit confused mid book. So I went back and started again at the beginning to give myself a better understanding of the story line. Then the story grabbed my imagination and I really got into the book.
William Tucker and his family immigrated to Trinidad in 1845 and his 15 year old son Willy is the center of the narrative. The body of the story is centered on the trip to the island and his reaction to the experiences there. Multiple layers of his life and emotions are told including: his coming of age and adaptation to island life, his first love for Marguerite and his fascination of the local hummingbirds. Willy’s lifelong interest in hummingbirds actually leads to a reconnection to Marguerite and pulls the story into completion.

Thank you to Akashic Books for sending the book and allowing me to review it. I greatly appreciate it.
added by JudiRobben | editLibrary Thing for Early Reviewers (Sep 26, 2013)

One reason I like Robert Antoni's As Flies to Whatless Boys (2013) may be that it features some fictional correspondence with the Director of the Trinidad and Tobago National Archives. The reason that I loved the novel, though, is because the archivist has fictional sex with the "Robert Antoni" character, but still refuses to let him make photocopies of the diary he is using to write the story how his great-great grandfather came to Trinidad. PHOTOCOPIES ARE AGAINST THE RULES, DUDE! She will, however, gladly continue to have sex with him while he is in town.

[full review here: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2014/07/as-flies-to-whatless-boys-by-robert.html ]½

Uh... I liked Marguerite. I hated the current day interludes. I was under the impression I would be reading about a failed utopia - and I did - for like 10 pages. This true story isn't much worth telling, should have just focused and made it a love story inspired by events. =/

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1845 London, an engineer, philosopher, philanthropist, and bold-faced charlatan, John Adolphus Etzler, has invented machines that he thinks will transform the division of labor and free all men. He forms a collective called the Tropical Emigration Society (TES), and recruits a variety of London citizens to take his machines and his misguided ideas to form a proto-socialist, utopian community in the British colony of Trinidad.

Among his recruits is a young boy (and the book's narrator) named Willy, who falls head-over-heels for the enthralling and wise Marguerite Whitechurch. Coming from the gentry, Marguerite is a world away from Willy's laboring class. As the voyage continues, and their love for one another strengthens, Willy and Marguerite prove themselves to be true socialists, their actions and adventures standing in stark contrast to Etzler's disconnected theories.

Robert Antoni's tragic historical novel, accented with West Indian cadence and captivating humor, provides an unforgettable glimpse into nineteenth-century Trinidad & Tobago.

My Review:

We sat in silence, exhausted, filled-up. We didn't move. We couldn't have moved--not a muscle--because we didn't exist yet. Neither me nor him. Only the story existed, during those few final moments of silence after my father's voice had come to a halt.

Catnip. This book was catnip for me, pure uncut catnip of the finest grade. Robert Antoni teaches master's degree fiction-writing classes at the New School. Lucky men and women who take the classes, to hear him tell his stories!

At its heart, this is a simple tale of greed, passion, and the lifelong effects of believing in a dream. Chicanery is always a worry for the True Believer, because the promise of a dream come true is ever the best bait to lure them into disaster, personal and financial and, not infrequently, mortal. Something dies when a person's True Belief is taken from them, or lost, or simply abandoned (as if this abandonment is ever simple). Many times, I suspect, the pain of it is unendurable and the bereft believer sees no reason to go on...disease or despair carry him off.

Others, like our narrator Willy, live on and make life, actual life, work for them without dreams, but with some weird, warped hopes left, hopes that don't see much daylight as the ex-dreamer isn't likely to chat them about. Willy doesn't really want to have hopes. He wants to find his dreams. I think all of us know that quest's end. But the novel, well, a novel is a place to work out the truths of endings and the frailties of beginnings. This novel's truth is in the ending, and it stings the soft places of a tender soul. It also rings perfectly true and wistfully beautiful. A family, once created, is a hard thing to leave, to destroy; even death doesn't do the job.

But most families have invisible members. Some have more than others. Willy...Mr. Tucker, as he becomes...carried the invisible members of his family until, exhausted, he lost the eternal battle with gravity. How, and why, and what he made, these are all the subject of the novel, and the meat of life as we all live it.

Only most of us don't have beautiful words to wrap our truth in. Fortune smiled on William Tucker. His truth comes enrobed in lovely, lovely language, satisfyingly musical in the inward ear.

A pleasure of a read. A lovely artifact of a book. A delight on many levels, and a deeply felt, deeply moving novel.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I hugely enjoyed reading AS FLIES TO WHATLESS BOYS. The main tale takes place in a place and time about which I knew nothing: Trinidad in the mid 1840's. If I were more knowledgable, I would know if this were historical fiction, or just fiction.

Likewise the story that takes place in the Present - there are three interrelated stories in three eras, in the book - in which the erstwhile writer "mr robot" has a verbal tussle with, and then a rollicking Rabelasian affair with, the director of the archives, could be pure fiction or historical fiction, or maybe it's autobiography. Whatever the truth of the story, it is great fun. I liked to read miss ramsol's (the archivist's) passages out loud, so I could get the rhythm of the Trinidadian patois she is given to speak.

The book has these brilliant audacious touches, metafiction aspects that enrich the tale. For example,the appendix is not found in the book itself, but online. One of the appendices is supposedly by Henry David Thoreau, which gives the writer Antoni a chance to play with style and content. (But, nicely, the supposed pages of the Thoreau essay are see-through, so one can read the text written on the backside of a page. What a great touch).
And I found myself looking up words, to see if they existed anywhere else but in this book. Here's a passage:

"He steupsed--
Boy, don't talk foolishness for me now!...He steupsed again,
turning from me--"
I used a web page that I suspect Antoni used too, called the Wiktionery, that has a glossery of Trinidadian English.
"Steups - the act of sucking air pass(sic) one's teeth, creating a sound of disapproval"

The metafiction aspects are more in the manner of playful and fun riffs, which are not particularly central to the main tales. I liked that one could read the book slowly or quickly, and spend as much or as little time as one wishes, on the non-central aspects of the book.

A librarian friend told me recently that she analyzes library patrons based on whether they gravitate towards character, setting, plot, or idea-driven literature and then recommends books accordingly. For "As Flies to Whatless Boys", it wouldn't matter which category a reader prefers. This book has it all. Characters are quirky and lifelike; settings breathe down your neck; the plot is relentless; ideas on race and place and ambition abound. On top of all of this is an exuberant and attractive messiness, which, to be honest, won't appeal to readers who like all ducks in rows. That is my one caveat in recommending this book-- deterministic (e.g. O. Henry-loving) readers beware. All others, devour with appetite!½

As Flies to Whatless Boys is a multilayered tale of dreams and hope and what can happen when they go awry. Because of the multi-storylines there is something here for everyone but also this means that not everything is for one person, and that is the case with me. I most enjoyed the storyline of Willie as a boy migrating with his family and others to Trinidad in the nineteenth century. His coming-of-age and his handling of the curves balls through at him makes this a heartwarming tale.

While I was less interested in Etzler’s inventions and the technical explanations this did not distract from my reading as I wondered how the characters were going to fare once they realized that their promises were not going to be realized. The author did an excellent job of weaving the storylines and time periods together and the supplementing them with the newspaper articles providing the reader with a fuller experience of the times and customs.

Overall, the imaginative tale, the beauty and hardship of nature and the fragility of the human spirit made this a tender yet eccentric read for me.

I received this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers. As with all my reviews, I approached it based solely on my impression of its pages.

Not many writers can write a story occurring in 4 different times told by three different narrators, but Antoni makes this difficult feat look so easy that you forget we're jumping far enough in time to make your skin ripple. Instead, the reader slides deep into the story, deep into the romance of Willy and Marguerite, the satiric comedy of Etzler's crazy inventions, and most importantly the mystery of Chaguabarriga. We don't feel the ripples of the story; we see them echoing and spreading through the ages up to the present day in a delicate, but fascinating manner, reminiscent of the hummingbirds that fascinate Willy.

My only suggestion is to include a brief guide to the Trinidad slang, as I had no clue what most of them signified. However, they didn't detract from the story, and reenforced that all the narrators spent at least the majority of their life in Trinidad. Perhaps it's time we made our reading more active and looked up definitions ourselves!

I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone looking for a challenging, yet thoroughly engaging read.

I've had a lot of difficulty with my review of this book. It's never fun to write a negative review, especially for a book that's received stellar reviews from a number of notable authors.

I was so excited to read "As Flies to Whatless Boys." A historical romance told through a collection of narratives, letters, newspaper articles, even emails - it sounded like the type of novel that I would immediately find engaging. However, what I forgot about was the story and even a brilliant format can't make boring, and sometimes ridiculously indulgent content, worthwhile.

Here's an example from the book:
... be tasting if you don't, & lil buddah say, look here mr robot, u want to cool out u photocopies in de archives? u say us plenty plenty more photocopies u needs to copy out in de archives? well we offering u a lil suggestion of how u could do it, as much photocopies as u could ever WISH to copy, & lil buddah say let me tell u something else mr robot: u think dat u could find anything so sweet as lil sis in amerika? all dem forceripe hardback women's dey got in amerika, & so stingy 2?

Seriously? This goes on for two pages and is repeated several times throughout the book. And while I understand the importance of sometimes utilizing hard to understand regional dialect and colloquialisms, I highly suspect that the author also included several made up words (at least, I wasn't able to find definitions for them and I DID look). The combination made any attempt to pull the story out of this confusing jumble of words very frustrating and disengaging.

I am willing to work to unravel a good story. Sometimes, doing that work is part of what makes the story so good. I read Virginia Woolf's "Between the Acts" at least a half-dozen times because I so wanted to understand the placement and purpose of every word in the story. Perhaps I'm just not sophisticated enough to appreciate the layered nuances of "As Flies To Whatless Boys. Whatever the case, I can't recommend it.

I received an ARC of this book as part of Goodreads Early Reviewers Program. That did not in any way affect my review.

"As Flies to Whatless Boys" by Robert Antoni

A varying amount of truth often underlies the fiction we read. How much? How altered?

"As Flies to Whatless Boys," has its roots in Antoni's family history. They did go from England to Trinidad in 1845 as part of an experimental Utopian society with J. A. Etzler, inventor of wind and water-powered machines.

This novel's 431 pages are packed with details of misadventure. Sympathetic readers will hope the author has greatly exaggerated the trials they faced.

I will remember the humming birds (and the lovely Marguerite) but, should I reread the book, will skip over the purported letters from the archive research assistant.½

"In truth, you've got no father a-tall, Bolom. Perhaps, though, rather than a father, you've got a second mother? One black, one white; one African, one European. Two mothers and no father: somehow that strikes me as perfectly sensible. As perfectly West Indian, Bolom. Three of us, here together in this old, broken-down Colonial house. Three of us here together in this bed: somehow that strikes me as perfectly West Indian, Bolom."

Bolom is the newborn to whom this story is told, and the storytellers are Lilla and Vel, a white formerly-rich woman living in the Caribbean and her indigenous servant. By being set in the Caribbean, the disruption of binary race relations opens up organic disruption and re-imagination of other societally-defined boundaries: of gender, of sexuality, of the structure of the family. Lilla and Vel have both been shaped by and have persevered through respective hardships related to those crossings of boundaries, as they endure struggles related to wealth and instability of their family structures. So when they come together later in life, in what would seem to be a simple master/servant binary, their identities are permeable enough to grow into a much more complex relationship, imbued with recognition and love of the humanity within each other. It's gorgeous and atmospheric and real, opening up multi-faceted expressions of love without regard for boundaries or limitations.

Horrendous!As previously posted, the only good thing about this novel is the page mirror in the center.The writer was trying too hard to create some aberrant stream of consciousness, artsy fartsy, intellectual post-colonial fictional discourse and literary work: he succeeded; I had to read this in a post-colonial Carribean grad course where it was embraced by a high-browed prof. A wretched work! I learned to know crap is to avoid reading crap.

With none of the dignity and grace of BLESSED IS THE FRUIT (his second novel and one worthy of five stars), Antoni's long-awaited third book comes as a bit of a surprise and a disappointment. There is a certain escapism factor in MY GRANDMOTHER'S EROTIC FOLKTALES that doesn't so much offer readers an escape as it does illustrate the great need Antoni seems to have for one. It is easy to imagine the author closing himself into his writing room and writing away manically, blending his memories of West Indian life with a bizarre seasoning of childish and somewhat silly tales of sex. There is nothing erotic about MY GRANDMOTHER'S EROTIC FOLKTALES. They are more humorous than sensual, more burlesque than art, and more farcical than real. But then, that is often the case with folktales. The misleading part in Antoni's book is the word EROTIC.
As usual, Antoni's strength is dialect - perfectly rendered. One can imagine the 96-year-old woman telling her ribald tales. We can hear her accent and her laughter. We can see the grin on her old, wrinkled face. There is certainly an element of reality in this book and the tales play out on the page the way they might on a stage. Indeed, it is easy to imagine a musical adaptation of Antoni's latest work.

There is some interesting and shrewd political commentary going on under the surface of these tales as well and that - along with Antoni's style - save the book. The question is: will Antoni fans forgive him for having fun or will they be insulted at this indulgence of his while yearning for another masterpiece like BLESSED IS THE FRUIT?

Lil Grandsol lives alone in the decaying old house that is all that remains of her family's plantation wealth. Vel is the young woman who has come to replace the long-time house servant. Together, Lil and Vel battle their histories and personal demons in a poignant attempt to survive. Antoni's tale of two West Indian women, one black and one white, from different socio-economic backgrounds is a wonderful example of stepping out of oneself to write. Antoni, a male writer, did this so well that one can only attribute his artistic ability to the unique mastery of mental gender crossing. Rich in West Indian culture, with pages of perfectly rendered dialect, and one in which religion plays heavily, this novel weaves in and out of sexuality alternately confusing and intensifying the narrative.This is a novel about the power of women and connections, and it forcefully evokes the real emotions that go into unexpected and untraditional love. It is amazing that the book has not gotten more attention. Antoni is brilliant, and his book deserves to be a West Indian classic along the order of Jean Rhys' WIDE SARGASSO SEA.

As Flies to Whatless Boys was a difficult book for me. I tried to stick with it but the dialect from that region was so off-putting, I couldn't wade through it. It sounded like it was going to be the kind of book I would enjoy but I didn't get far enough to made a good evaluation. Sorry I couldn't add any more information.