Pleasantview is a novel-in-stories set in a fictional Trinidadian town, where the sun-soaked surface of Caribbean life gives way to corruption, patriarchy, and the messy, interconnected fates of a community. Written in a blend of English and Trinidad Creole, it won both the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction and the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
My Review
Set in a fictional Trinidadian town, this novel-in-stories pulls back the curtain on a world that most outsiders only glimpse from a resort balcony or a cruise ship deck. Coconut trees, carnival, rum and coke. The postcard version. Mohammed is not interested in postcards.
What she gives us instead is a community rendered in full, unsparing detail: a political candidate slaughtering endangered turtles for sport, his rival beating his mistress badly enough to cost her their child, and the reverberations of one woman’s very public act of revenge rippling through Pleasantview until they reach two boys and a gun. The interconnectedness of the stories is one of the book’s greatest pleasures. Each chapter casts the web a little wider, folding in new characters while deepening the ones you’ve already met. You start to feel like a resident yourself, someone who knows where the bodies are buried and exactly whose fault it is.
Mohammed writes in a combination of English and Trinidad Creole, and the voice is pitch-perfect throughout. Sharp, funny, tender when it needs to be, and never once condescending toward the people it portrays. She holds the violence and the vulnerability in the same hand without letting either one tip the scale. The ex-tempo scene at the wake? Fire. Full stop. (San-tee-man-e-tay!) You will ache for some of these characters and want to planass others. Sometimes in the same story.