Pina

Praise for Pina:

“Pina’s Tahiti is not the paradise of brochures. It’s a land still haunted by colonization and crippled by poverty and crime. But even as things bottom out, a groundswell of Tahitian self-awareness builds toward the 2016 referendum on independence from France. The question is: Can the country, and Pina, ever truly break free? Peu’s ‘rough-hewn, oral, humane prose’ (in the words of the translator, Jeffrey Zuckerman) rings fiercely true.”

—The New York Times

“This evocative and layered story is a treat.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A scalding corrective to the romantic Western view of French Polynesia written with authority, urgency, and compassion”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Peu evokes Tahiti with rough, unsentimental grace; Jeffrey Zuckerman, who has translated writing by French speakers from across the globe, translates chatty prose with force and fluidity. Pina itself is a fluid, sprawling novel, telling the freewheeling story of a Tahitian family whose ‘fates go any which way, barely any detail in common.’”

—Lily Meyer, NPR

"[T]he compilation of characters which Peu has imagined are vibrant and diverse. A postmodern and polyphonic take on the coming-of-age novel . . ."

—Kiran Bhat, Asymptote

"[A] dark family saga about the effects of colonialism on one family and the nation they live in."

—Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews

“[T]he worst horrors, award-winning author Peu exposes in her English debut, belong to colonialism .... ‘Forging a voice in English that feels true to Titaua Peu’s rough-hewn, oral, humane prose,’ writes translator Zuckerman, was certainly a multilayered accomplishment of careful understanding and empathic respect. Bearing witness seems a minimal obligation for global readers.”

—Terry Hong, Booklist

"Peu’s portrait of Polynesia demonstrates the corrosive trickle-down effects of colonialism from generation to generation. . . . The keen manner in which Peu braids the strands of colonization, alcoholism, and domestic violence is nothing short of amazing.”

—Lanie Tankard, The Woven Tale Press

“Titaua Peu's Pina translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, out recently from Restless Books, is an extraordinary novel that brings to mind the fiction of Emile Zola, depicting dehumanization in a highly nuanced social setting, and with a lush naturalist eye. And although the book is written in French, it is infused at the same time with a syntax and vocabulary and style that derives from the Polynesian dialect spoken in Tahiti. And it will almost certainly be the first work of Tahitian literature you've ever read.”

—Dan Simon, Publisher of Seven Stories Press

“There are novels which crack like gunshots. Those of Titaua Peu mark a revolution in the literature of the Pacific. With Pina, it is the other face of Tahiti that appears; that of a society ravaged by cultural uprooting, worn down by misery and colonialism.”

—Mediapart

“Titaua Peu reappropriates words long monopolized by Europeans and returns them to their place in the “natural” part of Polynesian heritage.”

—Christine Chemeau, Le Monde Diplomatique

"The novelist seizes the reader with her fiery prose, serving her whirlwind story about the crossing paths of many different characters."

—Télérama