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A novel of a life built on the ashes of childhood
In the 1950s Tropical Republic, a boy lives amid opulence and privilege, spending days at the beach or in the cool hills above the sweltering capital, enjoying leisurely Sunday lunches around the family compound’s swimming pool. That is, until the reign of The Mortician begins, unleashing unimaginable horrors that bring his childhood idyll to an end. Narrowly escaping the violent fate visited on so many of his fellow citizens, he and his brother follow their parents into exile in the United States where they must start a new life. But as he grows, he never feels at home, and leaves his family to travel across Europe and outrun the ghosts of the past.
A searing novel of a life lived in the shadow of history, The Delicate Beast portrays the persistent, pernicious legacy of political violence.
Shelf Unbound “Recommended Reading” selection
Literary Hub “New Books” selection
“‘The bliss and the brutality’ of a childhood in early-1960s Haiti are portrayed with dreamlike, then nightmarish, eloquence. . . . There’s a mythic feel to the larger context . . . which makes the precise detail of this depiction of a young boy’s privileged yet fragile life in a large upper-class family even more effective.” —New York Times Book Review
“An existential epic.” —Trinidad Express
“Masterful writing. . . . A timely tale displaying the establishment of autocracy as inexorable once the process has begun.” —PopMatters
“Celestin is a skillful writer and storyteller. . . . The Delicate Beast is a feast.” —North of Oxford
“Intense. . . . A landscape of time and place, tightly focused, accurately and flawlessly depicted.” —Historical Novels Review
“Stylistically bold. . . . An investigation of the ways history does and doesn’t shape us.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Unsettling yet sensual, the evocative novel The Delicate Beast contemplates the personal and social aftereffects of history’s continued cycles of conflict.” —Foreword Reviews
“In a headlong flight from history’s black-winged angels, The Delicate Beast spirals across the globe and the twentieth century in densely sensual prose that merges the Caribbean surreal of Alejo Carpentier with the looping, philosophical conundrums of Javier Marías.” —Esther Allen, translator of Javier Marías’s Dark Back of Time and Antonio di Benedetto’s Zama
“From the novel’s lush opening, set in the ‘Tropical Republic,’ to countries and cities well beyond its frontiers, Celestin’s voice echoes not only in a world of pain and violence, but also in the beauty and miraculous weapon of literature.” —Maryse Condé, author of Waiting for the Waters to Rise and The Gospel According to the New World
“Brilliantly written, The Delicate Beast is a sweeping novel of a young man’s search for identity that follows him from a boyhood touched by the splendors and dangers of the ‘Tropical Republic’ into a new and startling international life. It is a powerful tale.” —Peter Constantine, author of The Purchased Bride
“A beautiful and devastating novel about a man born into horrifying political violence and condemned to experience the loss and sorrow he’s spent his whole life avoiding. The sometimes suggestive, sometimes shocking sense of boyhood Celestin creates here is reminiscent of two great classics, Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and Sebald’s Austerlitz.” —Alice Kaplan, author of The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach and Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris
“Henry James once said that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. The Delicate Beast is a fine example of history writ fierce and smart and large. This novel combines superb writing and psychological depth with grace and a knowing eye. Celestin’s protagonist struggles against the ‘determination of birth, blood, place, and time,’ until the ending suggests yet another possible beginning.” —Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin and Apeirogon
Roger Celestin was born in Haiti, emigrated to the United States at the age of eleven, and is Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut. The Delicate Beast is his first novel. He lives in Manhattan.