THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE NEW WORLD
A miracle baby is born on Easter Sunday, rumored to be the child of God. Award-winning Caribbean author Maryse Condé follows his journey in search of his origins and mission.
One Easter Sunday, Madame Ballandra puts her hands together and exclaims: “A miracle!” Baby Pascal is strikingly beautiful, brown in complexion, with gray-green eyes like the sea. But where does he come from? Is he really the child of God? So goes the rumor, and many signs throughout his life will cause this theory to gain ground. From journey to journey and from one community to another, Pascal sets off in search of his origins,
A miracle baby is born on Easter Sunday, rumored to be the child of God. Award-winning Caribbean author Maryse Condé follows his journey in search of his origins and mission.
One Easter Sunday, Madame Ballandra puts her hands together and exclaims: “A miracle!” Baby Pascal is strikingly beautiful, brown in complexion, with gray-green eyes like the sea. But where does he come from? Is he really the child of God? So goes the rumor, and many signs throughout his life will cause this theory to gain ground. From journey to journey and from one community to another, Pascal sets off in search of his origins, trying to understand the meaning of his mission. Will he be able to change the fate of humanity? And what will the New World Gospel reveal? For all its beauty, vivacity, humor, and power, Maryse Condé’s latest novel is above all a work of combat. Lucid and full of conviction, Condé attests that solidarity and love remain our most extraordinary and lifesaving forces.
- World Editions
- Paperback
- March 2023
- 184 Pages
- 9781642861181
Buy the Book
$18.99
About Maryse Condé & Richard Philcox (Translator)
Maryse Condé is the Grande Dame of Caribbean Literature. She was born in Guadeloupe in 1934 as the youngest of eight siblings. She taught Francophone Literature at Colombia University in New York, and lived there for many years. She has also lived in various West African countries, most notably in Mali, where she gained inspiration for her worldwide bestseller Segu, for which she was awarded the African Literature Prize and several other respected French awards. Condé was awarded the 2018 New Academy Prize (or “Alternative Nobel”) in Literature as well as the 2021 Prix mondial Cino Del Duca for her oeuvre. She also received the Grand-Croix de l’Ordre national du Mérite from President Emmanuel Macron in 2020. She conquered the hearts of many readers in English-language territories with her novels The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana and Waiting for the Waters to Rise, longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature in the US.
Richard Philcox is Maryse Condé’s husband and translator. He has also published new translations of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. He has taught translation on various American college campuses and won grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts for the translation of Condé’s works. Philcox’s translation of Condé’s Waiting for the Waters to Rise, published by World Editions, was longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature in the US, and his translation of her Crossing the Mangrove is now a Penguin Classic. Philcox has also translated Condé’s other World Editions title, The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana.
Praise
LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2023
“The great voice of the Caribbean.” —Jury, International Booker 2023
“French novelist Condé (Waiting for the Waters to Rise) delivers an ingenious bildungsroman of a messianic figure in contemporary Martinique. Readers will be transfixed.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“The novel (The Gospel According to the New World) follows a mixed-race, Christ-like figure who travels the world in search of meaning and belonging. Along the way, he encounters revolutionaries, tyrants, false prophets and actual Judases — not to mention a string of passionate lovers. It feels like a capstone work” —Anderson Tepper, The New York Times
“This inventive bildungsroman follows Pascal, an abandoned child in Martinique whose colorful life mirrors that of Jesus Christ, as he seeks to understand his purpose.” —The New York Times
“The leading Caribbean writer’s latest, compelling novel does not preach but it does instruct.”—Irish Times
Discussion Questions
1. What is The Gospel According to the New World about, according to you?
2. What were you expecting from a novel with “gospel” in the title?
3. How did it differ from those expectations? Did it perhaps omit anything you were expecting?
4. Which figures from the New Testament did you see reflected in characters in the novel? How did they correspond with the Bible?
5. Do you think the epilogue epitomized the message of The Gospel According to the New World, if the novel does indeed have a singular message?
6. It may seem that Pascal’s political views are more discernable and explicit than his spiritual values. What are his spiritual values?
7. How does The Gospel According to the New World deal with chastity, virginity, and simply with sex in general?
8. Is there an important difference between the Biblical Mother Mary and Fatima in this regard? If so, is Condé making a point?
9. Or is it Eulalie we should be comparing to Mary? Or rather Fatima to Eulalie?
10. What do you make of Fatima’s conversion to Islam?
11. What is the meaning of all the flowers? Is it significant that Pascal’s father Jean Pierre is a nurseryman?
12. How does Pascal differ from his biological father, to the extent that we have gotten to know him?
13. The tension between freedom and utopia runs through the book. The island of Pangolin has sacrificed freedom for a seeming utopia; on the other hand there are activists who metamorphose into managers overnight, such as Judas Eluthère. Does Pascal come to a conclusion about this tension?
14. What do you make of all the frustration Pascal seems to struggle with? Is he just human, or is there some important part of reality he is refusing to contend with?
15. What is the role of writing in Pascal’s mission? How about public speaking?
16. This book takes the reader around the world. What is the meaning of places like India, France, the USA, and Brazil within the story?
17. Why do you think Condé invents some of the islands and towns for parts of the story that take place in the Caribbean?
18. Does this book make you feel like reading some of Condé’s many other novels?