The Trou d’Eau Douce Book Festival kicks off this year with a landmark event in the history of Mauritian literature: the publication of Marcel Cabon’s complete works, by L’Atelier des Nomades. Extracts from Namastéhis most famous novel, and the story Le rendez-vous de Lucknow swill be read on the opening night of the festival, by former president Cassam Uteem and writer Ananda Devi.
Dominique Bellier
“It’s only the published work,” Robert Furlong points out to us, having surveyed and collected all Cabon’s writings for the publisher as soon as his work fell into the public domain in 2022. “I’d love to explore the manuscripts. It’s very important that his unpublished works and correspondence are also accessible to the public and to all those who want to explore this literature.”
By bringing to light a pillar of contemporary Mauritian literature, these complete works – published as they are – also redress an injustice: paradoxically, Marcel Cabon’s writings have hardly been republished since his death in 1972…
The first volume is devoted to poetry, the first genre in which the author expressed himself, first with 4 collections, then 70 poems published in magazines and newspapers. Cabon is a poet above all else,” exclaims Robert Furlong. Even when he writes prose, his vocabulary and evocations always go beyond reality and create a special atmosphere…”
Readers will find around 70 stories in the second volume, followed by novels and short stories in the third (including La Séraphine, published in Madagascar in 1947), and finally, in the fourth volume: biographies, travelogues and essays.
