In accordance with our meta agreement to have topic challenges and a later meta agreement to have topic challenges lasting for two months and overlapping by one month, it is time to announce the July–August 2024 topic challenge.
Based on the number of votes (+6, -1), our next topic challenge will be
the works of Maryse Condé
What's a topic challenge?
See the meta posts linked above, and also this main Meta post. In short, during July and August 2024 you are invited to try to get hold of one or more of the works by Maryse Condé, read them, and ask or answer questions about them.
Participation is not obligatory in any sense, and questions on other works are more than welcome during July and August too; they just won't count as part of this topic challenge.
How can I take part?
By getting hold of one or more of the works by Maryse Condé and
- asking good questions about it or
- answering questions that have been posted as part of this challenge or
- writing a review of the book on our Tumblr blog.
Questions about these works should be tagged maryse-conde and french-language. We'll keep a list of all such questions in an answer to this meta post.
Below is Tsundoku's presentation:
Maryse Condé (1934–2024) was a Guadeloupean/French novelist, playwright and critic. Her "novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales" (Wikipedia). She won awards for several of her works, which include the following:
- Hérémakhonon (1976), her first novel, "was so controversial that it was pulled from the shelves after six months because of its criticism over the success of African socialism".
- Segu (French: Ségou: Les murailles de terre, 1985) is set in the 19th-century Bambara or Ségou Empire of Mali and is the novel that brought her to prominence.
- The Children of Segu (French: Ségou: la terre en miettes) is a sequel to the previous novel.
- I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (French: Moi, Tituba, Sorcière…Noire de Salem, 1986) creates a character, Tituba, who was thrown into the same cell as Hester Prynne from Nathanial Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.
- Windward Height (French: La migration des coeurs, 1995) is a reworking of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
What's next?
- Vote for the next topic challenge or propose your own!
