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Hoyt Rogers

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Hoyt Rogers is a writer, translator, and internationalist. Born in North America, he has spent most of his life in the Hispanic Caribbean and Western Europe. He was educated at Columbia, Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford, where he received his doctoral degree in 1978. For a complete biography and curriculum vitae, please visit his website hoytrogers.com.

Hoyt Rogers has published many books; he has contributed poetry, fiction, essays, and translations to a wide variety of periodicals. His recent works include a collection of poetry, Thresholds (2023), and the novel Sailing to Noon (2023)—book one of The Caribbean Trilogy. He is also the author of a chapbook of poetry, Witnesses (1986), and a study of Renaissance literature, The Poetics of Inconstancy (1997). Among his forthcoming publications are the second novel of The Caribbean Trilogy, Midnight at Sea (2024), as well as a sequence of prose poems, Canvases (2024).

For more information, including his film industry credits, please see the full biography and curriculum vitae on his website, hoytrogers.com.

Hoyt Rogers translates from the French, German, Italian, and Spanish; for a complete roster of his books in this field, please see the curriculum vitae on his website, hoytrogers.com. With Alastair Reid, Robert Fitzgerald, and others, he collaborated on the Selected Poems of Borges. With Friedhelm Kemp, he published the first translations of George Oppen into German. He has translated six books by Yves Bonnefoy: The Curved Planks (with a preface by Richard Howard); Second Simplicity, an anthology; The Digamma; Rome, 1630; The Wandering Life; and (with Mathilde Bonnefoy) Together Still, the author's final poetry collection. With Paul Auster, he published Openwork, an André du Bouchet reader, and with Eric Fishman, a second du Bouchet anthology, Outside. He amply contributed to the two-volume Carcanet collection of Bonnefoy's poetry and prose. His edition of Yves Bonnefoy's Rome, 1630, received the 2021 Translation Prize for Nonfiction, awarded by the French-American Foundation. His translation of Marco Simonelli’s sonnets is forthcoming in 2024.

Hoyt Rogers has worked with a wide range of publishing houses, including Viking-Penguin, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Basic Books-Perseus, Bitter Oleander, Knopf-Random House, MadHat, Yale University Press, Seagull Books, Mudlark, Carcanet, Spuyten Duyvil, and MacLehose. His writings have appeared in dozens of periodicals: the New England Review, AGNI, The Antioch Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, Harper's Magazine, Words Without Borders, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, the Partisan Review, Nimrod, the Harvard Review, Ensemble, and Cahiers Européens—to mention only a few. He has received critical attention in The New Yorker, Books & Culture, PN Review, The Arts Fuse, the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Variety, the Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, the Times Sunday Book Review, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Review, and many other publications. He is a Contributing Editor for The Fortnightly Review, the online cultural journal based in Britain and France.

For several decades, Hoyt Rogers served as an interpreter for professional exchange programs and as an organizer of educational travel and cultural encounters throughout the world. In this context, he collaborated with Vice-President Al Gore, Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, author and President Juan Bosch, Galápagos Islands Governor Eliezer Cruz, environmentalist Gnohite Gome, choreographer Bill T. Jones, immunologist Anthony Fauci, artists Carlos Colombino and Enrique Zamudio, economist Paul Samuelson, Shuar-Achuar leader Miguel Puwainchir, chemist Mario Molina, playwright Octavio Solis, trans activist Vera Morales, poets Maya Angelou and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, filmmakers Souleymane Cissé and Godfrey Reggio, as well as many others. On official assignments or on his own, he has traveled to some of the most remote places on the globe.

SAILING TO NOON Cover
FICTION & LITERATURE

SAILING TO NOON

BY Hoyt Rogers • POSTED ON Dec. 7, 2023

A tropical island hosts a plethora of colorful characters in this first installment of Rogers’ Caribbean Trilogy.

Set in the lush fictional Caribbean island of Canuba in the early 1980s, a time when “ethnic, appearance, and gender sensitivity had not even reached today’s low standard,” the novel introduces Chiara Trigona, an outspoken yet bookish semiretired journalist. Considered lovely by the local islanders (with her “pink epidermis and ‘good hair’”), Chiara is originally from Sicily and is an ex-New Yorker. She is taken with the island’s rich colonial history, the bronze statue of Sir Francis Drake in the center of town, and the spacious house and circular belvedere tower she rents. Infrequent writing jags whisk her away from the island, populated by Canubans who speak in a “springy, expressive” hybrid of Spanish, pidgin English, and French and are a polite if quirky community of artists, families, recurring tourists, and mavericks. The Canubans’ island is a sensual wonderland where “time is elastic” and the streets are filled with historical monuments and peopled by kooky locals. Complicating matters for Chiara is the turbulent love-hate dynamic she shares with Amado, a young, hunky, insatiably amorous man who, despite being married to Reina, keeps Chiara as his secondary lover. (The arrogant, womanizing Amado also unapologetically courts a coterie of girlfriends on the side.) Though Amado, Chiara, and Reina casually intermingle, Reina becomes furious when she finds out about his other affairs and violent fights ensue, attracting the attention of Amado’s brother-in-law, Sigfrido, who’s a cop. Chiara’s hyperactive friend, Lamia; her spiritual housekeeper, Luz Divina; local Voodoo priestess Diana; and Catulo, another of Chiara’s part-time, pansexual lovers also populate Rogers’ imaginative, overstuffed saga. Amado’s confession of a love affair outside of Chiara’s and Reina’s orbit escalates the novel’s climax into a frenzy of suspicion, disastrous melodrama, and sorcerous revenge.

The author confides that the inspiration for his novel was drawn from notebooks he’d received from a Sicilian journalist who was preparing to permanently withdraw and disappear into “an unnamed country in Asia” in 2016. The sparsely plotted story he concocted from this starting point derives its greatest appeal from the characters and their gritty dialect as well as the amount of intricate detail Rogers stuffs into these pages. The author excels at depictions of the lush, atmospheric island features, Chiara’s sexual conquests, and her daily dress-code decision-making process. Rogers is also masterful at building and elaborating upon a community of salty islanders, suspicious wives, lusty lovers, and recreational acquaintances all set in melodramatic motion or caught in moments of erotic impulsivity. The narrative benefits greatly from multiple narrators who offer vibrant perspectives on the misadventures and mishaps surrounding these tropical misfits—though at times, the flashy pageantry of Rogers’ vigorous and frequently rambling prose does become wearying. By the time the rollicking conclusion arrives, it’s evident there are many more tales to tell of this island; Canuba becomes a character in and of itself. Rogers employs satire, sex, and drama in wondrous ways.

A shaggy, oddly engrossing Caribbean epic powered by a vivacious cast of frenetic islanders.

Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2023

ISBN: 9781959556589

Page count: 414pp

Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

Review Posted Online: April 5, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024

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