THE peripatetic protagonist of Dimitry Elias Léger’s new novel, Death of the Soccer God (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27.00), arriving almost a decade after his last novel, God Loves Haiti, is one of those literary creations one hardly encounters anymore in Caribbean fiction: a raconteur and scamp, a lover of women and pleasure, and a lover and player of the beautiful game—soccer. Gilbert Chevalier is a wealthy, light-skinned Black Haitian whose proximity to famous people and involvement in Haitian politics give the novel the air of a nineteenth-century Bildungsroman. He is, in some respects, a lesser Mickey Sabbath, although Gilbert lacks Sabbath’s sexual-deviation streak and, unlike Philip Roth’s character, is not Jewish. What they share is an exuberant commitment to living life to the fullest and a certain devil-may-care attitude toward personal fulfilment. Both are willing to risk much to pursue that singular satisfaction.
Gilbert falls in love with another woman on the night of his own wedding and abandons his bride for the enchanting Aurelie. This act of irresponsible spontaneity becomes a defining feature of his character, carrying him through a life of adventure, pleasure, danger and ultimately imprisonment, until he finds himself standing before a firing squad in the notorious Haitian prison, Fort Dimanche, where he has endured years as an inmate under the government of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier.
The novel is told from the immediate predicament of Gilbert’s impending execution. He stands before the firing squad, blindfolded, waiting for the bullets to hit him. The familiar saying that “your whole life flashes before your eyes” becomes Léger’s central conceit: perhaps only when life is about to end do we think about it most completely—its pleasures, failures, loves, regrets, and losses. Gilbert’s thoughts constitute the novel. Standing in a prison yard before the firing squad, he remembers, regrets, suffers and relives the extraordinary life that has brought him to this moment.
“Way leads on to way,” Robert Frost wrote, and the way to Gilbert’s death is a circuitous one, taking him from Haiti to the wider world and eventually back to his beloved homeland, the place from which he began and to which he remains emotionally tethered. Between leaving and returning, he has lived a full life, and he has lived it with gusto. Along the way, he has had plenty of time for two of his favourite things: women and soccer.
Gilbert falls in love with nearly every woman he meets, and they fall in love with him, which is hardly surprising. He is handsome, cheerful, amiable and overflowing with charm—a kind of Haitian James Bond. But Gilbert moves through women much as he moves through ports and places where he sojourns. Parting from his lovers is not always such sweet sorrow. They pass behind him like night, while his true north remains Haiti, where he has left his true love, Aurelie.
His other great love, soccer, travels with him, or, perhaps more accurately, soccer takes him everywhere. In this sense, the novel is ultimately a love story, though not the sappy, sentimental sort associated with Erich Segal’s Love Story. It is closer in spirit to John Updike’s Brazil, in which genuine peril stands between the lovers and the possibility of reunion. Whether Gilbert and his beloved can ultimately return to one another is therefore bound up with the larger question of whether a person can ever truly return to the life he has left behind.
The novel is firmly attached to a vanished historical past. Léger depicts an idealised Haiti of the 1940s and 1950s, a Haiti profoundly different from the country we know today. This is, in large measure, a novel of Haiti’s economic and political ruling class, particularly the mixed-race, mulatto elite into which Gilbert Chevalier is born and in which he remains firmly entrenched.
Gilbert comes from a well-to-do Haitian family of German and African ancestry. He grows up without the privations that haunt poorer Haitians, surrounded by privilege and opportunity. Yet his childhood is complicated by his relationship with his brother, Jackie, the son of a maid in the household and born to a different mother. The brothers’ relationship becomes another kind of love story: long-lasting, dependable, and rendered with considerable subtlety. Their bond is among the novel’s quieter and more affecting relationships.
The Chevaliers are not wealthy, however, and Gilbert’s father, anxious to restore the family fortune, devises a plan. Gilbert must marry the newly arrived daughter of a recently arrived Nazi couple, and in exchange he must give up the soccer he plays every day. Gilbert agrees on one condition: his father must allow him to attend Columbia University in New York. A bargain is struck.
But on the night of his wedding to the Nazi princess, who, judging by what she says and does, may be the real Nazi of the family, Gilbert sees Aurelie, a local woman from a poorer part of town, and falls madly in love with her. He abandons his bride for Aurelie. Léger turns to magical realism to dramatise the couple’s mutual elation. They dance with such abandon that they become light enough to float, eventually dancing upside down on the ceiling along with their equally buoyant guests. It is an exuberant and wonderfully improbable scene, perfectly suited to Gilbert’s romantic temperament. He has passed from his wife to Aurelie, but he must nevertheless leave his new love for Columbia University, in New York.
The novel is rarely, if ever, boring. Gilbert’s life moves from one excitement to the next. In New York, he rooms with jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, spends nights in jazz clubs, and encounters John Coltrane and other luminaries of the era. He meets beautiful women and plays pick-up soccer in Central Park. Eventually, he is recruited for the United States World Cup team and travels to Brazil, where he scores the only goal against England in the 1950 World Cup, bringing him instant fame.
Gilbert’s proximity to famous people is one of the novel’s most important conceits. In Brazil, he meets the young Pelé, as well as other famous Caribbean personalities. He travels through Europe playing soccer and moves easily among the worlds of sport, music, politics and celebrity. Meanwhile, he remains separated from Aurelie, with whom he has a daughter, for ten years. When he finally returns to Haiti, he is immediately arrested and thrown into the notorious Fort Dimanche prison, where he eventually faces the firing squad.
The novel is often philosophical, particularly in its meditations on God’s will and the relationship between divine intention and human agency. Gilbert argues with the Saviour himself, encounters that give the novel not only sporadic humour but also serious depth. Léger uses these conversations to ask whether human beings truly control the paths they take or whether, looking backwards from the end of life, every choice begins to resemble part of a predetermined design.
At only two hundred and twenty-two pages, Death of the Soccer God achieves the expansiveness of an epic. It is a well-written and often lyrical tale, exciting without being merely sensational and philosophical without becoming ponderous. Gilbert is an extraordinarily likeable protagonist, and even Miles Davis appears here in a more relaxed guise: a lovelorn genius of the horn rather than the famously forbidding figure of musical legend.
Léger renders the Haiti of the 1940s and 1950s with a knowing authenticity, populating it with characters who are vivid, complicated and memorable. Not least among them is the grotesque and masochistic Papa Doc, portrayed as a sexual deviant who has his way with Gilbert’s Nazi wife. Death of the Soccer God can be bawdy and violent, sometimes almost extravagantly so, but it is, for the most part, a remarkably balanced portrait of Haitian lives lived at different levels of society.
Léger has written an entertaining and ambitious novel about memory, desire, exile, history and the possibility of return. Gilbert’s impending death gives the story its urgency, but his appetite for life gives it its pulse. He has loved women, played soccer, crossed borders, known celebrities, survived political terror and repeatedly chosen pleasure over prudence. Now, standing before the firing squad, he has nowhere left to go but backwards—into the life he has lived. And in that final reckoning, Death of a Soccer God asks its most compelling question: what does a life look like when, at the very moment it is ending, we are finally forced to see all of it?
