Like Last of the Just, which traced the Jewish experience of martyrdom, this book recreates through fact and myth people's enslavement and humiliation, and survival—and produces one of the most extraordinary heroines in black literature.
"A beautiful book, told in a dreamlike flow of images. . . . The work of a conscientious and gifted writer."—The New York Review of Books
"This book must be read to be believed. . . . Surely it shouldn't be possible to tell the tortures of slavery in the manner of a fairy tale and still convey the extent of the atrocity. . . . André Schwarz-Bart can, and does, make literature out of agony."—New York Times Book Review
"A Woman Named Solitude is a really brilliant conception of a black consciousness. . . . Schwarz-Bart recreates the slave experience as it must have seemed to the West Africans sold to white traders as tons of black flesh. . . . The chapters set in Africa seem to me the purest evocation of negritude by a white writer that I have read anywhere."—Saturday Review Syndicate
"Although written in a deceptively uncontrived style, this very powerful book brilliantly telescopes history and conveys all the breadth of emotion of a good epic poem."—The New Yorker
Andre Schwarz-Bart is the author of The Last of the Just, which was awarded the Prix Goncourt.
