Kaya Days

“De Souza’s prose, which includes significant amounts of Kreol in addition to French, mirrors his protagonist’s transformation: his sentences, in Jeffrey Zuckerman’s excellent, language-mixing translation, are compelling at the book’s start, but become downright hypnotic by its end. Kaya Days is a novella designed to be read in one gulp, and Jeffrey Zuckerman’s prose is propulsive enough to make the book nearly impossible to put down.” —NPR

“The rhythm of revolution beats through every sentence of this dazzling novel. In Jeffrey Zuckerman’s shimmering translation, the history and cultures of Mauritius form the background, and its sounds and smells the fore, of a rich portrait of a nation in a moment of change.  –Noah Mintz, Literary Hub

“A work that renders the electric immediacy of sensation with vividness, kinetics, and a musician’s aptness for rhythm…De Souza’s densely packed novel is a disorienting one, purposefully so. He jars his readers again and again through sudden shifts in character narration, transmogrifying objects and people, and juxtapositions of violence and jubilation.” —Laurel Taylor, Asymptote

“Electric…De Souza’s unpredictable, propulsive tale is a rip-roaring trip teeming with beauty, anger, possibility, and helplessness.” —Publishers Weekly

“A much-anticipated novel in translation from a Mauritian maestro… An electrifying portrait of a tiny island nation on fire.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Carl de Souza’s Kaya Days is a searing, urgent, far-seeing dispatch that imprints the reality of Mauritius, at odds with its picture-postcard views, on the global consciousness. Carl de Souza is a formidable voice in Mauritian literature; his account is an indictment and a plea for understanding among its communities. Mauritius, so often depicted as a paradise of pastels, endured these days of upheaval in the wake of the Creole singer Kaya’s death as two communities forgot their fellow-feeling and broke out in violence. Carl de Souza’s prose is a warning to us all: no matter where we are, we are each inhabitants of an island, and if we don’t draw the right lessons, we may find ourselves in fire and blood as well.” —J.M.G. Le Clézio, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

“It’s books like Kaya Days that remind me why I commit my waking hours to foreign literature. I’m hard pressed to find something similar to Carl de Souza anywhere in American fiction—his haunted stylings, his wanderings, his dense depictions of violence that feel both immediate and unreal. Santee navigates a furious island in the midst of an uprising, and through Santee we see an unbelievable spectrum of characters and their sorrows. Jeffrey Zuckerman’s ability to translate de Souza’s French and Creole blend into English is a feat all its own. It’s actually Zuckerman’s keen attention to the dialects of Mauritius that makes this text so uniquely situated against its peers, and gives us a sort of roadmap to this island in the Indian Ocean. Let’s praise the people who have ushered de Souza’s work, for the first time in English, into our hands and onto our shelves.” —Spencer Ruchti, Third Place Books (Seattle, WA)

“Beautiful, evocative novel that brings to life the island and people of Mauritius.” —Kerry Barringer, Little City Books (Hoboken, NJ)