The Emperor

Award-winning Orcel (The Immortals), whose books address the trauma of life in his home country, Haiti, is well known in France but less so in the U.S. The narrator in this novel waits in his bedroom for the police to arrest him for murder as his thoughts retreat to his childhood: abandoned by his parents and taken in by the Emperor, a charlatan who teaches him to play drums for vodou ceremonies. Events don’t coalesce neatly as in a plotted novel but rather provide a Kafkaesque take on life in an unstable land as they unfold. The narrator flees the Emperor and on a bus, meets a woman, the only person in his life thus far who has treated him as worthy. He exits the bus in Port-au-Prince, leaving the woman behind, and finds a job, delivering newspapers. His lecherous boss orders him to deliver papers to a house in the city, where the beautiful woman from the bus happens to live. For a week, there’s a romance of sorts, and then she’s gone. The narrator is then fired, and his hatred boils out, directed against the boss but also his own hurtful life. He poisons his boss and sits, waiting for the police.