Nouveau Haitiah Paperback – February 3, 2015

"Nouveau Haitiah" is Donald McEwing’s first novel, and will make readers hungry for more.The book follows four main characters and how they navigate life in the often harsh but also beautiful alien world of Nouveau Haitiah. More generally, it also tells the story of human life and how it fits in with this world. Nouveau Haitiah is markedly different from the world of the reader because of its unusually-colored purple and yellow flora, the eight-legged arachnoflies, and the human civilization that seems lost in the world of early 18th century Haiti. It is also a brutal world because of the hostile natural environment, the constantly warring factions that cut each other down with machetes, and the almost exclusively parasitic relationships between the non-human species. But the world of Nouveau Haitiah is not entirely unrecognizable. The senseless fighting between factions resembles many of the conflicts in our own world. The apparent chaos of the natural world in Nouveau Haitiah is modeled after Nature in the real world. And the struggles and questions of the primary characters—Leon, Victoria, Odette, and Professor Alihak—are struggles we face and questions we ask of ourselves, especially reconciling with death, tragedy, and suffering. The novel “Nouveau Haitiah” ultimately becomes a reflective piece—hinted by the front cover with its picture of Victoria looking into a mirror—and tells the story using a unique genre blend between the reflective voice of literary modernism and the fast-paced narrative style found in science fiction. Leon, the character who narrates the story most often, is forced to reconcile with death and pain right from the beginning of the novel, when he is led to the camp of one of the fighting factions on Nouveau Haitiah. He is new to this strange world, and is confused and horrified by the senseless fighting, the suffering of the soldiers, and the barbaric wounds inflicted on them after an ambush. Leon tries to help the wounded in the camp, and although his intentions are initially driven by compassion, they become mixed through the course of the novel with his more selfish quest to find the Fountain of Youth. Over the course of the novel, this becomes more of an attempt at self-preservation rather than helping others. Donald McEwing does a brilliant job with re-imagining the conflicts and unfortunate facts of life that exist in our world. Like many science fiction novels, “Nouveau Haitiah” offers a much-needed fresh perspective on the reader’s own life and the world around them. He also points out what I think is an overlooked and underrated view on the power of love versus the power of compassion. Many stories that reflect on any kind of pain portray love as a remedy for suffering, loneliness, or discord between people. This is not only boring and unoriginal but also somewhat limiting, and something of a pitfall for many of these stories. Love helps keep family and friends together sometimes, but not always, and it’s unrealistic for anyone to develop so deep a bond with more than a fraction of the people they ever meet in their life. So what can be offered to the rest of those unfortunate people who don’t receive love? McEwing’s novel stands apart from most stories in that it is not just love that keeps the characters together and leads to any kind of resolution, but more often compassion. It is easier and more common to share than love, and McEwing’s book speaks to this overlooked but very simple idea. Compassion is what keeps Victoria and Remy together when Leon abandons them, and it is what initially drives Victoria and Leon to try and bring peace between the fighting factions. As McEwing points out in the close readings at the end of the book, very few of the interactions between the characters are driven by love, and I would guess that this redistributed balance between love and compassion more closely resembles most readers’ everyday interactions. McEwing also ponders the validity of people being immortalized through books, and I personally found this to be one of the most important takeaways from “Nouveau Haitiah”. Being able to communicate and feel others’ emotions across time is beautiful, but as McEwing points out through Leon, is reading about someone or something the same as experiencing it? Can documenting the living being or experience in ink encapsulate the living thing itself? What Leon and Professor Alihak seem to discover in the course of the novel—whether they realize it or not—is yes. The written description may not capture everything about the subject, but it gives the opportunity for the subject to be reanimated in the reader’s imagination. Professor Alihak observes this when he declares that, “Thanks to you, readers—the memories I recorded will come alive again in the future of a new context, within the setting of your imaginations. The words take on a life of their own. They circumscribe their own reality.” As Alihak observes, imagination is powerful, and I would like to add that the way a reader connects with the contents of a book is just as relevant as the connections they form with people, places and things in real life. I found this especially true when I read McEwing’s detailed description of predation in the natural world of Nouveau Haitiah, a spider on the hunt:“Hunger kept it seeking. It did not know or care about drought, dry winds, the lake which once covered this dry ground, or the waterhole in the distance; the spider continued its hunt across the octagonal pattern of cracks with a sense of urgency, yet no sense of time. It knew only the blazing bright light, shadow, and the sharp creosote odors of the land.”I connected with Nature in this passage as much as I connected with Nature in real life. And the way that McEwing uses vivid imagery to highlight the extraordinary within the apparently mundane makes it so easy to form this connection. The spider, entirely absorbed in its everyday quest like a person absorbed in their own plights, is depicted against the formidable backdrop of the “octagonal pattern of cracks”, “blazing bright light, shadow, and sharp creosote odors”. It’s a dramatic sequence, and it’s easy to empathize with the spider. Writing like this is case and point for this message in countless other episodes throughout the novel, and so the book itself becomes a reminder of the immortalizing effect of literature.“Nouveau Haitiah” is also full of historical references and allusions, which adds to the richness of the story. For those without much knowledge of Marcel Proust, Toussaint L’Overture, and others, Donald McEwing includes short essays in the back of the book that explain the different references and what they mean. This adds to the richness of the story, and makes the novel an accessible learning experience for its readers in addition to a well-told story.While it is his first novel, “Nouveau Haitiah” is not the only book that McEwing has written. So fortunately for readers, the appetite kindled by this first novel can be fed, hopefully for many more novels to come!

This is a great book from first time author Donald McEwing. Nouveau Haitiah was well described, and I could almost feel the overpowering humidity and visualize the colors! The characters are well developed and I especially liked the Official Hostess, Victoria. There are a number of clever twists and turns in the story, and a few deeper themes are evident. Being invested now in the characters, I look forward to another book set in Nouveau Haitiah!

The speculative fiction genre is a sneaky one. It tends to coalesce the ever-popular Science Fiction genre with fantasy and horror, often with an end result like a weird fusion of Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. New novelist Donald McEwing takes this all-encompassing genre and spins it to meet his own literary agenda as illustrated in his work Nouveau Haitiah.The novel itself acts as a cerebral massage; though containing characters that have popped up in literature over time, they are bold and original in their intents and overarching plans. The main chAracters in "Haitiah" are a motley crew of sorts in terms of literary themes. There's the strong heroine, the sucker who wants to stay young forever, and the witch. Each of the aforementioned jointly embark on the sordid quest of historical preservation and ultimate redemption. Along the way of these concurrent quests, McEwing masterfully documents the existence of an organic, exciting, and exotic world that is described in ways that enable the reader to envision its existence.At its core, Nouveau Haitiah is a deftly visual work. McEwing pulls in the reader with his skillful style of depicting plots and situations that are strangely accessible and profound. It's a thoroughly original and unique work, and McEwing stays true to his overall vision to depict a world that must experience tumult and revolution in order to find its true purpose. Can a book be an experience in all senses? If not, then Nouveau Haitiah comes extremely close.