What Storm, What Thunder

On January 12, 2010, an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 people perished in Haiti’s horrific earthquake. Here, Guyana Prize–winning Chancy (The Loneliness of Angels) uses precise, exquisite language and deftly interlinked stories to convey not simply a visceral understanding of what happened that day, of the suffering incurred and the mutual support given even as help from abroad stuttered, but a portrait of Haiti itself. There’s heart-of-the-community market woman Ma Lou and young Jonas, who buys eggs from her and runs errands for Dieudonné, business partner and companion to high-class sex worker Sonia; Jonas’s mother, Sara, who lost him and her two little girls in the earthquake and is now visited by their ghosts; expatriate businessman Richard, cousin to Dieudonné and neglectful son to Ma Lou; drug-running Trinidadian Leopold, also cousin to Dieudonné; Sonia’s siblings Taffia and Paul, who find their mother after the earthquake but whose troubles continue in one of the innumerable tent cities set up after the earthquake; and their older brother Didier, a Boston-based musician anguishing from afar while pondering the awful strictures of Black life in the United States. All are remarkable and remarkably drawn characters whose heartrending experiences convey what it’s like “having to live in the after, always, remembering the before.”