Marilene Phipps-Kettlewell

The Company of Heaven: Stories from Haiti is an award winning book of short fiction whose stories center around characters in Haiti. I found the stories to be eye opening and entertaining, introducing us to a culture and landscape that I am pretty unfamiliar with. We are immersed in the heart wrenching poverty that engulfs the country and the astronomical divide between classes, as shown when the narrator of a story belongs to the mega rich upper class denizens residing on a landed palatial estate, whose oppression of the native population is abundantly clear.

The stories offer a variety of themes, several of which have common denominators, such as the subject of dark magic, or "vodou"; a widespread practice and belief in Haiti. I found this subject to be particularly fascinating. Sometimes, in these narratives, we find that the rich fall further than the poor, and ultimately suffer more that those surrounding them in dire poverty.

The writing is very good and flows smoothly from page to page. Oftentimes, I forgot it was fiction I was reading and felt I had been transported to Haiti itself. I was sorry when the book ended.… (mere)

With the earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, Haiti has been in the world's focus. With Marilene Phipps-Kettlewell's collection of short stories, we can get some insight into the country that has drawn our attention.

The book is refreshing, giving us a view at Haitian culture beyond voodoo and extreme poverty. Phipps-Kettlewell reveals a diverse nation in its class and economic strata and its religions. Voudoun is present in some of the stories, but it is fairly portrayed as an important belief alongside Catholicism. There are elements of magical realism (another stereotype First World nations tend to dump on the literature of Latin American and Caribbean countries), but most of the stories reveal their wonder through the author's poetic writing.

Some stories will stand out more than others, but there are no mediocre works in this collection. I hope it can open a door not only for Phipps-Kettlewell's growing career but also for other Haitian and Caribbean writers.… (mere)

A loosely connected collection of short stories set in Haiti, The Company of Heaven paints a series of images of Haitian life. Most of the stories present different perspectives on a particular family; other stories seem related to the others only by the inclusion of similar creatures (doves, pigeons, dogs, chickens, and goats), plants (guavas, bayawonn trees), and/or structures (iron gates).
I very much wanted to like this collection. Indeed, my copy is marked with flags indicating particularly beautiful language; some passages actually took my breath away. The author's experience as a poet and painter definitely come through at times. Unfortunately, there were too many passages that I wanted to hack up with my editor's pen (e.g., whole sections with sentence constructions of "x is y" or sentences similar to "The painting was painted . . ."). Perhaps the corrected page proofs will have undergone some careful editing to make the writing more even.
One thing I appreciated about the writing, though it was confusing at first, was the use of changes in perspective/point of view. The long central story, River Valley Rooms, worked particularly well in this regard, as did the story, The Chapel, written from the point of view of a chapel.
Despite some misgivings, I would still recommend this book to someone who already has some interest in Haiti and has read other Haitian writers (though probably not as an introduction to Haiti and Haitian life.)… (mere)

This collection of short stories about the lives of contemporary Haitians was awarded the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Several of the stories are good, especially "Dogs", in which an elderly woman keeps an unruly group of wild dogs who she favors over humans, and "Marie-Ange's Ginnen", an account of a woman who is tricked, along with several of her neighbors, into taking a boat that will supposedly take them to Miami but runs out of fuel soon after it leaves the coast. The writing in these stories is lyrical; however, I found it difficult to engage with the characters and their stories, and I became increasingly uninterested in the book after its promising beginning.… (mere)