My Heart Beats Fast

Situated in contemporary Martinique, My Heart Beats Fast centers Kim, a young man accused of murdering his father, his sister's partner, and her young son. The narration braids three temporalities: the present of the trial; the recent past of Kim's youth shaped by Martinique's entanglement with late-stage capitalism and/as neocolonialism; and a longer duration that stretches back to slavery and the plantation, where Kim's Antillean matrilineal origins have their roots. This nonlinear narrative makes generous use of analepses as visions and memories whispered by the spirits of the ancestors to Kim's sister Edith, who attempts to understand what led her brother to commit such a horrific act. In addition to blending elements of realism and the marvelous, Mon coeur bat vite is written in a particularly poetic, urgent yet precise prose that has earned Chonville many accolades. Chonville's novel is at the vanguard of a new Antillean literature that moves beyond creolite (the last identifiable literary movement in the Antillean canon) in several important ways: first, although it does reflect on the past (as indeed prescribed by the creolistes), it is firmly anchored in the present, which Chonville, a trained social scientist, captures unflinchingly. Second, it complexifies the Antilles gender landscape with characters whose intersectional realities are explored with depth and care.