Why a Booktrail?
2000s: In vibrant, addictive Trinidadian prose, Love After Love questions who and how we love…
Love After Love
What you need to know before your trail
Meet the Ramdin-Chetan family: forged through loneliness, broken by secrets, saved by love. Irrepressible Betty Ramdin, her shy son Solo and their marvellous lodger, Mr Chetan, form an unconventional household, happy in their differences, as they build a home together. Home: the place where your navel string is buried, keeping these three safe from an increasingly dangerous world. Happy and loving they are, until the night when a glass of rum, a heart to heart and a terrible truth explodes the family unit, driving them apart. Brave and brilliant, steeped in affection, Love After Love asks us to consider what happens at the very brink of human forgiveness, and offers hope to anyone who has loved and lost and has yet to find their way back.
Locations
Reset- Caribbean - Trinidad
- A: Port of Spain
- B: Port of Spain - Tragarete Rd
- C: Chaguanas
- D: San Fernando - Cipero street
- America/ USA- NY
- E: 9th Ave/50th street
- F: Port Chester
Travel Guide
From Trinidad to New York with Love After Love BookTrail style
Trinidad
Written in Trinidadian dialect , this story is firmly set in Trinidad, mainly in Port of Spain and other towns. We meet Betty Ramdin’s husband Sunil, who takes out his anger on Betty and their little boy Solo. Betty is a battered wife, fearful for her son. From the outside, life is good, but from within, there is mess and chaos. This violent start to life has consequences between mother and son years later. A friendship with a co-worker later provides her with an escape. She lives in a huge house and needs a lodger. There are too many memories here, bad ones.
Trinidad is a unique society in this novel – there are rules about love and in Trinidad trying to embrace who you are under the judgmental eyes of everyone else can lead to terrible consequences.
New York
The move to New York creates more boundaries and distance than the physical ones. There is distance between characters and love, the two countries are a break between past and future. The city here is fast, furious and unrelenting. Far different to the Trinidad he has left behind.
Booktrailer Review
An interesting book on many levels as that title is both confusing and very very clear at the same time. This is not a book about love in the romantic sense but is one about love, hate, friendship and everything in between.
A woman in Trinidad lives with her husband and son. She is abused in the marriage and so often finds herself having to cover things up and make things nice for her son to hide the truth from him. When her husband dies, she starts getting out more and meets a certain Mr Chetan who will change her life, in ways neither of them expected.
This is a character based novel rather than one to highlight the culture of Trinidad but the language of the novel itself does that. The nuances of the dialect, the culture of not being able to leave a marriage, fear of being judged however, come through loud and clear.
Both Betty and Mr Chetan are very complex and interesting characters. They are affected by birth, life experiences and also caught up in the decisions that other people make. We all are to some extent, but this one is unique in the way that two such very different characters seem to share more than they realise.
When the story moves to New York, none of the Trinidadian flavour is lost. It’s enhanced somehow as if taking the people out of their natural habitat makes them seem closer to their roots. The son finds out secrets and flees to the big city. Both Mr. Chetan and Betty have shameful secrets, criminal even. There are different rules it would seem in Trinidad about love and being who you are and this will provide interesting topics for book clubs!
BookTrail Boarding Pass: Love After Love
Destination/location: Trinidad, New York Author/guide: Ingrid Persaud Departure Time: 2000s
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