A HUMAN sum
Makenzy Orcel
(Payot-Rivages, 624 pages, 2022)
***Short-listed for the Prix Goncourt and Goncourt des Lycéens 2022***
***WINNER OF THE 2023 CHOIX GONCOURT US***
***TRANSLATION SAMPLE AVAILABLE HERE***
The dead dwell in the truth, and the living tell lies.
—Haitian proverb
By leaving his country of origin, Haiti, Makenzy Orcel takes a step forward in his already brilliant career as a writer. A Human Sum will undoubtedly be another steppingstone in his powerful and unique body of work. —Christian Roinat, America Nostra
After jumping to her death in the Parisian subway, a young woman in her thirties reaches from beyond the grave to tell her story. Only death can liberate her voice and transform the intimate sum of her short life into a dazzling literary adventure.
In her notebooks, the narrator evokes her solitary childhood in a small village in the South of France under the indifferent gaze of her “progenitors,” the domineering presence of her racist uncle and the daily visits of the local spiritual authority, a funny little parish priest, fervent adept of the cocktail hours. The only light in this ossified provincial world of petty power plays and toxic gossips is the comfort of her loving grandmother, who keeps reminding her granddaughter that “words are stronger than us.”
In her quest for happiness, the narrator escapes to Paris, yearning for a new life. She briefly studies literature at the Sorbonne and meets some fleeting success as a slam poet. Immersing herself into the kaleidoscopic life of the city, “its vast anthology of instants, noises, faces…,” its cafés and cemeteries, she runs into Orcel, a Malian refugee with whom she shares a luminous and tragically ephemeral love story. She settles for a time with a white man, the perverse and “infernal Makenzy” whose eventual abandonment leads to her demise.
A Human Sum is the second volume of a proposed trilogy that began in Haiti with L’Ombre animale and will continue in the United States. Through the life of a young woman and a rich set of singular characters, Makenzy Orcel delivers a somber portrait of contemporary France and its many woes. By careful listening to his female character, he brings dignity to her life and by extension to the lives of the many women subjected, like her, to sexual and psychological violence. Her voice carried by Orcel’s rich vocabulary, rhythm, and his artful defiance of syntax, will long linger with us.
Born in Haiti, Makenzy Orcel is the author of a body of work composed of both books of
poetry and highly acclaimed novels, including L’Ombre animale (Zulma, 2016, which received the Prix Littérature-Monde and the Prix Louis-Guilloux), Maître-Minuit (Zulma, 2018), and L’Empereur (Payot-Rivages, 2021). His first novel, Les Immortelles, was published in English as The Immortals by SUNY Press in 2020.