MAMZELLE DRAGONFLY

An overwhelmingly lush ambiance and its attractive protagonist are the chief pleasures of this otherwise rather lax 1987 novel (and US debut) by Confiant, a Martinican author who will remind many readers of the better-known Patrick Chamoiseau and Edwidge Danticat.

In alternating chapters, an omniscient narrator shares with only child Adelise Félicité the rhythmic telling of the story of her life (in the 1950s) in the village of Glotin; misadventures “In-City” (i.e., Martinique’s capital Fort-de-France) as a fledgling prostitute, mother-to-be, and victim of a presumed “curse”; and eventual escape from both the cane fields that have made her mother a prematurely old woman and a disastrous marriage to a handsome, weak-willed stevedore for whom the beauteous Adelise is clearly too much woman. Men are essentially marginal figures anyway in this loosely plotted tale, which is dominated by such colorful elements as surrogate mother (and procuress) Aunt Philomène and by Adelise’s dreamlike remoteness from the facts of sex and poverty, embodied in the mysterious kinship she feels with “her” tree (a backyard jastram, beneath which, we later learn, her mother had buried Adelise’s afterbirth). More supernaturalism, in fact, might have helped, for Confiant whizzes all too quickly through such potentially interesting materials as the ethics and sociology of prostitution, the joyous extravagance of “Carnival,” and the opposition to French colonialism represented by Fort-de-France’s energetic mayor Aimé Césaire, the celebrated poet and avatar of “Négritude.” The story’s only really convincing tension arrives near its end, when Adelise ruefully acknowledges that “I’d lived as heedlessly as a dragonfly,” and vows to become her own woman.

Intriguing and intermittently dramatic, but awfully sketchy. Chamoiseau and Danticat do it better.