"A Woman Named Solitude is a really brilliant conception of a black consciousness. . . . Schwarz-Bart re-creates 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
"This book must he 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 beautiful book, told in a dreamlike flow of images. . . . The work of a conscientious and gifted writer."—The New York Review of Books
"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
