Blessed Is the Fruit

Antoni overwhelmed the senses with many intimacies of island life and of women's beautiful and exclusive suffering. The fact that some parts of this novel were written by a white person or by a man was hard to believe. Reading this novel was like dreaming about a past life.

Lil Grandsol lives alone in the decaying old house that is all that remains of her family's plantation wealth. Vel is the young woman who has come to replace the long-time house servant. Together, Lil and Vel battle their histories and personal demons in a poignant attempt to survive. Antoni's tale of two West Indian women, one black and one white, from different socio-economic backgrounds is a wonderful example of stepping out of oneself to write. Antoni, a male writer, did this so well that one can only attribute his artistic ability to the unique mastery of mental gender crossing. Rich in West Indian culture, with pages of perfectly rendered dialect, and one in which religion plays heavily, this novel weaves in and out of sexuality alternately confusing and intensifying the narrative.This is a novel about the power of women and connections, and it forcefully evokes the real emotions that go into unexpected and untraditional love. It is amazing that the book has not gotten more attention. Antoni is brilliant, and his book deserves to be a West Indian classic along the order of Jean Rhys' WIDE SARGASSO SEA.

Robert Antoni's _Blessed_is_the_Fruit_ is one of the most lyrically expressive and ingeniously experimental novels of the last 50 years. As in his first novel _Divina_Trace_, Antoni pays particular attention to the structure of his novel. _Blessed_ has the structure of a rosary with each of the three main sections made up of 10 , or a decade, of sections. This is a particuarly appropriate image for a novelist whose 2 novels have focused on the saving and damning power of religion, both formal and folk, in Caribbean society. At heart of _Blessed_ is a moving tale of the crossing of racial and religious boundaries, of the birth of a new, yet questionable, hope to a confused and struggling culture. This novel has been labeled confusing by one reader, but it is no more confusing than life itself, and this novel is intricately structured to allow the reader to fully appreciate the plight and joy of the two main characters.