Rosie Carpe

Rosie Carpe is a novel by the French writer Marie NDiaye, first published in 2001 and translated into English in 2004. Its heroine travels from France to Guadeloupe with a child, a pregnancy and very little else.

Rosie Carpe arrives in Guadeloupe looking for her brother Lazare, who has been missing for five years, and the island is confusing from the first day. The elegant black man who comes to meet her calls himself Lagrand and may or may not be the dishevelled white brother she is looking for. Her parents, who abandoned her in Paris, have also appeared and are throwing themselves into a second youth of conspicuous affairs, and it is not clear whether they have lost their minds or simply found a new audience. Rosie is also trying to escape a former employer and seducer whose business is making pornographic films.

NDiaye writes about families who cannot stop damaging one another and about the ways a person can vanish without ever leaving, and she treats Guadeloupe as a place where murder, mayhem and carnival sit close together. The novel was translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for the cinema in 2010.