Ti-Coyo and His Shark by Clement Richer. London. 1951. Rupert Hart-Davis. Translated from the French by Gerard Hopkins. 184 pages.
DESCRIPTION - Ti-Coyo, a shrewd and winning half-caste boy rescues a wounded baby shark, which becomes his faithful sevant as it grows into a monster fearful to everyone but him. MORE daring that Mr. Belloc - who included a tiger among his suggestions for domestic pets - though scarcely more cynical, Clement Richer lauds eloquently the charms of the shark. Whether he tells a sophisticated story simply or a simple story with sophistication, is hard to determine. All that one can say is that he sets violence, horror and tragedy dancing to an odd, enchanting, little jig of his own. Mont Pele thunders and flames, overwhelming the island of Martinique: a boy Trains a shark to bite in two the competitors in diving for American dollars and English guineas: a rich planter is overwhelmed in a lava-flow, his daughter marries the shark-tamer, and looks like living happily ever after. These are the bare bones of this queer, idyllic, heartless, lyrical story, where terror becomes a tamed denizen of fairyland, and the basest of human motives live in a curious shimmer of innocence. In this over-moral world of the New Puritanism, it sounds a clear note of laughter and uninhibited delight. It is scarcely necessary to mention the excellence of Gerard Hopkins's translation, were it not that its very quality may induce the reader to forget that what he is reading is a translation at all.
Clement Richler was a prolific Martinican writer of entertaining tales. Although Ti-Coyo and His Shark is the first book by Clement Richer to be published in the United States, he is the author of seven novels. Most of his works are focused in one way or another on the sea, with settings from The West Indies to France, Mexico and Spain. Clement Richler was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, in 1914, went to college in the little French town of Moulins, and later studied in Paris in the Faculté des Lettres (Sorbonne) and the Ecole des Sciences Politiques. In 1937 his first novel was published. He won numerous literary prizes in France, among them the Prix Paul Flat, awarded to him in 1941, and again in 1948, by the Académie Française.
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