The Caribbean is home to a mix of independent and colonial islands. Inhabitants and emigrants have a rich literature; it seems like everyone who has come into contact with one of these places has written an excellent novel. Add Even in Paradise by Elizabeth Nunez to the list. This is a retelling of King Lear. The Lear figure is Peter Ducksworth, a descendent of white colonists living in Trinidad who considers himself to be fully Trinidadian. Of course, he moves to Barbados when his daughters are adolescents, which the Black people in Trinidad interpret being about making it easier for them to find white husbands.
Trinidad and Tobago is a former British colony that has been independent since 1962. The majority of the people identify as East Asian, African, or a mix of the two. Peter Ducksworth and family would have been part of the 7% or so of the people who identify with other ethnicities. Barbados doesn’t have a large white population, either, but it’s large enough that it worked for the purposes of this novel.
The narrator is a Black man, Emile Baxter, the son of a Trinidadian doctor who was close friends with Peter Ducksworth. As a child, Emile became friends with Ducksworth’s youngest daughter, Corinne. The novel progresses through Emile’s relationship with his father, the Duckworth sisters machinations, college life for Emile and Corinne in Jamaica, and the literature of the Caribbean. Underneath all of it is the tension of race and class in a racially mixed community.
Some aspects of the book seemed a little neat, the better to mimic Shakespeare, but overall, I really liked this. Check it out.
