From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
This is a book that sounded interesting from the description - although there were some issues I had with it, such as this woman proudly proclaiming her wealth (which was measured in slaves), like it was some sort of an achievement rather than a shame. Given that she was the daughter of a woman who had been a slave you might have expected some empathy there, but I read none in this novel based on the life of this woman who lived in the latter half of the eighteenth century.
The book is first person which is almost never a good voice, and in this case it makes the main character seem even more self-centered and self-absorbed than she would have in third person. Additionally, the novel is too Americanized, has too modern of a sensibility, and a total lack of empathy for the slaves this 'wealthy' woman owned.
As you might guess from the title and the description, the book was far more about her romance than ever it was about the ethics of what she was doing with that life. I had hoped for better. I'd decided to give it a try and see what the author had done with it, but quite quickly discovered that I was not pleased. The story is truly humdrum and offers little in the way of interest - at least not for me.
It’s of a woman who might have been a fine business woman, but who apparently has the ethics and integrity of a Donald Trump - someone who I hope to never read about again after January 20th. For example, I had multiple problems with this part: "At nineteen, I myself already owned the coffee plantation Welgemoed, which is doing quite well, along with two hundred slaves which are my own personal property, not the plantation’s. A sense of well-being touched me when I thought of Welgemoed."
I confess I'm not sure how that distinction works: the slaves are hers, not the plantation's, when she owns the plantation, but that's not the point. This woman, Samson, has a sense of well-being knowing that she has personal ownership of 200 slaves? Frankly that made me sick, and turned me right off her. It should have made her sick, coming as she did from a family that were slaves in past generations, but evidently that impinged on her considerations not one whit. The fact that she apparently sees nothing wrong at all in this contradiction in her life is mystifying to me and apparently the author was uninterested in exploring it.
Now it may well be that this is exactly how the real Samson felt, but the fact of it - or at least the fiction of it in this book made me dislike her intensely, and it strongly dissuaded me from wanting to continue reading. At one point, for example, I read, "We employed a slave to walk a few meters before us and beat the ground with a palm frond to frighten away snakes." That's so cold and callous. If this is even remotely the truth of how she was, why should I give a damn about what happens to her or what her personal troubles are? I have to wonder why the author would include something like that. Is she deliberately trying to make her character unlikable?
The fact that the author uses meters is particularly problematic because Elisabeth Samson died in 1771 and the meter wasn't 'invented' until the early 1790s! Samson would have used an archaic Dutch measure, such as an el or a rod or most probably a voet, which is pretty much the same as a foot (the Dutch word voet means foot). The book description claims that the book is "Rich with emotion and historical detail," but quite obviously, it isn’t. I detected little of either.
It also has the occasional oddity. For example, there was a sentence which made no sense to me: "Isaac is not happy with Liesbeth’s a particularly evil neighbor who is known to have slain one of Quackoe’s slaves." I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. Liesbeth and Quakoe are characters in the novel, but the sentence makes no sense. Maybe that indefinite article needs to be removed?
As that quote a few paragraphs back revealed, one of the early properties owned by Samson was Welgemoed. That's the name used in the book, but in Dutch, the word means 'good cheer' - that's what the property was called. That's how Dutch speakers would hear it. I don't imagine the slaves would think of it that way, but the owner undoubtedly did, so given that it's a much more evocative (and hypocritical!) name in English, why use the Dutch term, like it has no real meaning? At another point I read that slaves were "strolling towards the back of the plantation house to the keuken house." Keuken is the Dutch word for kitchen (think 'cookin'!), so why not use 'kitchen'?
This capriciousness in employing Dutch words in some places and not in others was seemingly quite random. It made for an oddly unsettling reading experience and overall it didn't work. The book felt far too American and not Dutch at all. Note that Suriname is on the northeast coast of South America and was a Dutch colony. The Dutch got it in exchange for the English getting New York City after a war. The official language in Suriname today is still Dutch, although many natives speak a lingo called Sranantongo. Why there was not more of a Dutch flavor to this novel, I do not know.
I have a problem with authors who do not seem to realize that words - even people's names and place names - have actual and real meaning and they therefore carry power. So in the same way the Dutch term for kitchen was used in place of the English, the English term 'manumission' or derivatives of it were used frequently in the novel.
The term which was popularly used in the middle of the nineteenth century, but not so much before or after, comes from Latin via French, and it relates to freeing slaves, but it’s far more of an American term than it is a Dutch word. The Dutch equivalent is 'vrijlating', a word which also saw a spike in usage in the mid-nineteenth century, but nowhere is that term used in this novel. It’s like this American author, rather than tying Samson to her Suriname and Dutch roots was deliberately trying to divorce her from them, and Americanize her. For me this spoiled the reading experience and rendered it very inauthentic.
How Samson was in real life, I don't know. I honestly doubt I would have liked her had I met her, but the cold attitude she evidently had toward her slaves in this work of fiction was quite off-putting. I read at various points very early in the novel things like: "La Vallaire sent for something more potent than mope, and also some slaves to fan us as the breeze had died down."
Carl Otto is the man Elisabeth supposedly loves, but at one point he outright states, "He may kill as many Negroes as he pleases...as long as he pays the five hundred florins a head." The text adds, "Carl Otto is always quick to present the logic of a situation." But that's not logic, that's mercenary callousness, and the fact that this is the cold jackass that she loves made me see there was a lot wrong with Elisabeth if she evidently sees nothing wrong with what he has said there. And the Dutch used guilders, not florins as such.
Maybe that's really how Elisabeth Samson was, in which case she deserves no respect whatsoever, no matter what she did for marriage. I can't credit a woman for liberating herself when she owns 200 slaves and is proud of it. I don't want to hear how she was a product of her time. She was a woman who had slavery in her recent past, and yet she felt nothing for the slaves she personally owned? I mean if she felt bad for her slaves she could have freed them all and hired them as workers, but she apparently did not. She was apparently not a good person regardless of her marriage endeavors, and this author neither feigns painting her in any endearing strokes nor does she offer any kind of commentary on her appalling attitude toward slaves. If, frankly my dear, she doesn't give a damn about her slaves, then why should I care a jot about her?
I DNF'd this book because it was not for me, and I honestly can’t see any thinking and feeling person finding anything romantic about it, the way it’s written.
