Culture September 16, 2016

The Mauritian writer Ananda Devi’s 2006 novel Ève de ses décombres, just released in an arresting and beautiful translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman as Eve Out of Her Ruins, starts with an image of Eve, a twig-thin girl of seventeen, limping out of the ruined edges of a city, school bag slung across her shoulder. “Walking is hard,” the book begins, “I limp, I hobble along on the steaming asphalt. With each step a monster rises, fully formed. The urban night swells, elastic, around me. The salty air from the Caudan waterfront scrapes my wounds and my skin, but I go