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Biographical note
Léonora Miano was born in 1973 in Doula, Cameroon. She is the author of nearly twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her writing has won numerous literary awards, including the Prix Femina in 2013 for Season of the Shadow, published by Seagull Books in 2018. Gila Walker is the translator of more than a hundred books and articles from French, including texts by Jacques Derrida, Tzvetan Todorov, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Shmuel Trigano.
"Ms. Miano's essential premise is that a profound 'subterranean wound' was inflicted by colonialism, and that collective injury has continued through falsely enforced social hierarchies and self-immolating psychic resentments . . . The incantatory quality of the writing conjures this heightened, almost religiously attentive feeling, creating a sense of mystical potential even as the story itself dwells in suffering."
The Wall Street Journal
Four women speak. They speak to the same man, who is not there. He is the son of the first, the great-yet-impossible love of the second, the platonic companion of the third, the older brother of the last. Speaking to him in his absence, it is to themselves that these women turn, examining their own stories to make sense of their journey, from twilight to twilight, through a mysterious stormy night in the middle of the dry season.
Together, the voices in Twilight of Torment: Melancholy, the first volume of a two-volume novel, perform a powerful and sometimes discordant jazz-inspired chorus about issues such as femininity, sexuality, self-love, and the intrusion of history into the intimate lives of people of African descent. Blackness confronts African-ness, love is sometimes discovered in the arms of another woman, the African renaissance tries to establish itself on the rubble of self-esteem damaged by history. Each of these women, with her own language and rhythm, ultimately represents a specific aspect of the tormented history of Africans in today’s world, and at the end of the night, they will each arrive at a dawn of hope.
"Ms. Miano's essential premise is that a profound 'subterranean wound' was inflicted by colonialism, and that collective injury has continued through falsely enforced social hierarchies and self-immolating psychic resentments . . . The incantatory quality of the writing conjures this heightened, almost religiously attentive feeling, creating a sense of mystical potential even as the story itself dwells in suffering."
The Wall Street Journal
Four women speak. They speak to the same man, who is not there. He is the son of the first, the great-yet-impossible love of the second, the platonic companion of the third, the older brother of the last. Speaking to him in his absence, it is to themselves that these women turn, examining their own stories to make sense of their journey, from twilight to twilight, through a mysterious stormy night in the middle of the dry season.
Together, the voices in Twilight of Torment: Melancholy, the first volume of a two-volume novel, perform a powerful and sometimes discordant jazz-inspired chorus about issues such as femininity, sexuality, self-love, and the intrusion of history into the intimate lives of people of African descent. Blackness confronts African-ness, love is sometimes discovered in the arms of another woman, the African renaissance tries to establish itself on the rubble of self-esteem damaged by history. Each of these women, with her own language and rhythm, ultimately represents a specific aspect of the tormented history of Africans in today’s world, and at the end of the night, they will each arrive at a dawn of hope.