Hadriana in All My Dreams, winner of the prestigious Prix Renaudot, takes place primarily during Carnival in 1938 in the Haitian village of Jacmel. A beautiful young French woman, Hadriana, is about to marry a Haitian boy from a prominent family. But on the morning of the wedding, Hadriana drinks a mysterious potion and collapses at the altar. Transformed into a zombie, her wedding becomes her funeral. She is buried by the town, revived by an evil sorcerer, then disappears into popular legend.
Set against a backdrop of magic and eroticism, and recounted with delirious humor, the novel raises universal questions about race and sexuality. The reader comes away enchanted by the marvelous reality of Haiti’s Vodou culture and convinced of Depestre’s lusty claim that all beings—even the undead ones—have a right to happiness and true love.
~~~~~
I learned about Hadriana In All My Dreams from the wonderful Bogi Takács; eir monthly Diverse Book Highlights on eir blog and Patreon are incredibly useful, and e brings to my attention all kinds of books I wouldn’t otherwise find out about – including, much earlier this year, this particular Haitian text, translated into English almost thirty years after its original French publication.
Hadriana In All My Dreams is a novel in three parts, and each part has a different narratorial voice and approach, but they combine to a whole. The first part is the story, told by Patrick Altamont from his perspective as a child, of Hadriana’s wedding day and funeral. It has a childlike innocence to it, although there is still an eroticism and sexuality shot through the celebrations; but its the eroticism of a person who hasn’t had sex, who idealises it without really understanding it. Depestre’s use of stories in this section is especially fascinating; as well as telling a chronological story, there are nested stories told by other characters to Patrick and to each other, which explain in mythological terms the events being witnessed or that contextualise things in historical terms. The fact that the stories have a different narrative voice to Patrick’s in this first section is powerful, and really shows them as recounted from the voices of others.
The second, brief section of Hadriana In All My Dreams is of an older Patrick, looking back on the suppressed memory of Hadriana’s death and apparent zombification; this is the most varied section in terms of style. Depestre includes an academic argument, albeit with vulgar language, a newspaper report in the style of a travel puff piece, and an imagined interview with a journalist, as well as more traditional narrative forms; the mingling of these registers serves as a fantastic bridge away from the simple narrative of the first half, centring external perceptions of what happened to Hadriana, even while trying to fit them into theory. This is also the part which is most referential; authorities from Levi-Strauss to Fanon and de Beauvoir are quoted, although there is also a sardonic undercutting of the theoretical, as Depestre’s narrator wonders where the place of an individual is in the midst of theoretical discourse.
The final section is where we see a real shift in Hadriana In All My Dreams, from Patrick’s narrative to Hadriana’s own. Depestre moves us from an external experience of zombification, and of the funereal rites, to an internal one; from a participant and celebrant to an unparticipating focus. This subjective shift is achieved with fantastic style, and comes with a slightly more free-ranging narrative; built into this section are dreams and recollections, telling stories within stories and contradicting the stories others are telling about Hadriana. There is also an interesting shift of sexuality; whereas Patrick’s sexuality in the first two sections is essentially adolescent, Hadriana’s is much more adult, although largely unexpressed apart from gropings and one particular encounter with another woman.
The way Depestre, and in her translation Kaiama L. Glover, use language is incredibly effective. Each section has a slightly different dialect and voice, and they’re consistent with their sections, calling to mind a slightly different image of the narrator; and Hadriana In All My Dreams flows incredibly well, with an attention to important details that really vividly bring Jacmel to life and the characters of the book to a loud reality. The one place where Glover, perhaps reflecting Depestre, hits some strange snags is in the approach to genitalia; this feels clunky in its figurativeness, and the language used trips the mind up rather than flowing as part of the text, in a strange way.
Hadriana In All My Dreams is an interesting novel, and unusually resonant for a zombie novel. Zombies are, of course, famously versatile metaphors, whether for consumerism or faceless foreign immigrants one is allowed to kill; here, though, zombification isn’t a metaphor, but a literal truth, around which other things are thrown into focus. Depestre doesn’t write about zombies with horror but rather with a kind of wistfulness for the impact of the zombification; Jacmel is changed utterly by Hadriana’s story, as social divisions over religion, race, and culture are thrown into stark contrast, and that is where the interest of the narrative lies.
Hadriana In All My Dreams is a beautiful, elegaic novel full of life; a zombie novel, but not like any other zombie novel I’ve read. It’s good to see Depestre’s brilliant book has finally made it into English, and I hope it’ll lead to more translations to come.
If you found this review useful, please support my ability to write by contributing to my Patreon.
Intellectus Speculativus 