“Marie Ursule woke up this morning knowing what morning it was and that it might be her last.
“She had gathered the poisons the way anyone else might gather flowers, the way one gathers scents or small wishes and fondesses … she had been diligent and faithful the way any collector would be, any fervent lover … she had even felt the knowing sadness, the melancholy that lovers feel, the haunting not-enough feeling, the way one covets the flight of swifts and terns and nightjars.” Dionne Brand, At the full and change of the moon
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At the Full and Change of the Moon is one of those lilting tales, full of great beauty and even greater sadness, the type of tale where the cadence of the narrator’s voice can carry you farther into melancholy than any rocket can carry you into space.
The novel reminds me a lot of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude. There is a map of characters at the beginning, the story is long and loops in on itself–an epic, you might call it–and there are characters named Ursula. Maybe I’m stretching but read the two sections aloud and see if you see the similiarities.
One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs.”
Hypnotic is the best way to describe this type of prose.
At the Full and Change of the Moon, according to the back cover, is set in 1824 on the island of Trinidad. Marie Ursule, queen of a secret society of militant slaves, plots a mass suicide–a quiet, passionate act of revolt. But she cannot bring herself to kill her small daughter, Bola. Bola survives and her children and grand-children and great-grand-children spread out around the world. The novel is the interconnected stories of six generations of Marie Ursule’s descendents.
Hmm, sound familiar? One Hundred Years of Solitude, the finest epic of modern time, chronicles the lives of six Buendia generations, starting with Jose Arcadio and Ursula.
These are two very fine novels.