Marie Noël does not know who her father is, nor does she know why her mother abandoned her immediately after her birth and left her in the care of Ranleys, nor does she know what prompted this mother to send a letter ten years later demanding her daughter.
The girl travels into the unknown, living with an emotionally cold mother, tormented by memories of the past. After she grows up, she goes to Boston to complete her studies, and marries an innovative jazz musician, while the question, “Who am I? And who is my family?” continues to haunt her in all the places she lives, and so she seeks to understand what happened before she was born, but a series of dark secrets... And the elusive facts are faced.
In this novel, which won the Prix Carbet de la Caraibe, Maryse Conde writes a tale of lost love and unwanted motherhood, capturing the voice of the Caribbean diaspora with grace and sweetness.
The title of this book highlights the characteristic of the author’s production. “Studies” means research, contemplation, and theory, while the word “love” means a permanent event in human life, and a feeling that rational philosophy sees as a confused and ambiguous mixture about which it is not possible to conduct intellectual research.
But the writer here fulfills the imperative duty he formulated: “Theory must open its clear eyes to subjective life from time to time. The viewer guesses and looks, but what he wants to see is life as it flows before him.”
In this study, the writer isolates the essence of love and purifies it, removing from it all the additions that obscure its realistic nature and complicate its process. It is love explained based on psychological and phenomenological research at the same time, and even on social research, since choice in love is considered one of the most effective factors in history.
