Reading guide: The Gospel According to The New Word by Maryse Condé, translated by Richard Philcox

Baby Pascal is strikingly beautiful, brown in complexion, with grey-green eyes like the sea. But where does he come from? Is he really the child of God? So goes the rumour, and many signs throughout his life will cause this theory to gain ground.  

From journey to journey and from one community to another, Pascal sets off in search of his origins, trying to understand the meaning of his mission. Will he be able to change the fate of humanity? And what will the New World Gospel reveal?

About the author

Born in Guadeloupe in 1934 as the youngest of eight siblings, Maryse Condé is considered the Grande Dame of Caribbean literature.

Condé taught Francophone Literature at Columbia University in New York, where she lived for many years. She has also lived in various West African countries, most notably in Mali. Here, she gained inspiration for her worldwide bestseller Segu, for which she was awarded the African Literature Prize and several other respected French awards. She was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2015 for her complete body of work. Condé has been awarded the New Academy Prize in Literature as well as the Cino Del Duca World Award for her oeuvre. She also received the Grand Cross National Order of Merit from President Emmanuel Macron in 2020. Condé first conquered the hearts of many readers in English-language territories with her novels The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana and Waiting for the Waters to Rise, longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature in the US.  

About the translator

Richard Philcox is Maryse Condé’s husband and translator. He has also published new translations of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks.
Philcox has taught translation at various American colleges and won grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts for the translation of Condé’s works. His translation of Condé’s Waiting for the Waters to Rise, published by World Editions, was longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature in the US, and his translation of her Crossing the Mangrove, first published in French in 1989, is now a Penguin Classic.

The Gospel According to the New World centres on the life of Pascal, a young man who is depicted as a Christ-like figure on a quest to find his benevolent and loving father. Condé has said that she found the courage to retell the story of Christ after reading ‘José Saramago’s The Gospel according to Jesus Christ and the South African author J.M. Coetzee’s trilogy on the same subject.’ Why do you think writers are fascinated by and compelled to write about the gospel story? 

As with much of her previous fiction, Condé examines the history and the politics of the Caribbean. The Gospel According to the New World is set in a fictionalised Caribbean island similar to the author’s native Guadaloupe: an ‘overseas department’ that is beautiful, temperate and crowded with tourists. How does the novel’s wild, Caribbean setting contribute to Pascal’s story?

The novel shows how, as Pascal grows up, he and his friends are routinely persecuted. They are ‘ridiculed, jailed unjustly, ostracized [and] disenfranchised’. Pascal also speaks against the mistreatment of women, immigrants, the disabled, and the destitute. Why do you think Condé writes of these injustices? In what ways can the novel be used as a weapon in the fight for social justice? 

The Gospel According to the New World is a novel about belief. While the book recounts a modern version of the story of Christ, there are other faiths and forms of belief present in the text. What is the effect of Conde’s inclusion of multiple faiths and conceptions of the world in the text? Does it push us towards a more expanded and tolerant world-view? 

The Booker judges said the book ‘plays with our need to believe in a Messiah’, even though we tend to mock such figures. Condé has stated that her mother was a devoted believer while her father an atheist and ‘an ardent critic of my mother’s religious beliefs’. She said wished to translate this ‘dichotomy in my novel into humour and irony’. Why do you think Condé chose humour to confront these opposing views?

Condé has stated that she spent roughly a year writing because vision loss caused her to ‘dictate the text to a friend [and her] husband.’ She said she was ‘sensitive to sound and meaning because the writer is also a musician.’ What do you think she meant by this, and what aspects of the ‘sound’ of the writing captivated or intrigued you? 

The Irish Times noted that ‘Pascal is a reluctant Messiah, however. He drinks. The worship of his followers irritates him. When his teachings are quoted back to him, the only thing that strikes him is their banality.’ Does Pascal’s disdain for his worshippers and his human traits endear him to you as a reader? Does Pascal’s fallibility enable us to see the human in the divine, or the divine in the human? 

Condé’s depiction of Pascal as a Messiah unites the sacred with the sensual. His rage against injustice is portrayed alongside his amorous tendencies. Why do you think the author chose to show Pascal in this light? Does it change the way we think about religion and desire? 

The judges write that it is a book ‘full of wisdom and love.’ What did you make of the novel’s representation of love, particularly in the relationship between Paul and his absent father? Does Condé suggest that longing is inherent to all love? 

The novel is also concerned with journeys, in the case of Pascal, his Messianic life takes him across the Americas. Travel is a recurring motif in many of Condé’s earlier works, such as the novel Segu which takes the reader from Europe, the Americas to Africa and back again, simulating the triangular trade. Which of the many journeys undertaken by Pascal resonated with you the most? In your view, what is the significance of journeys in the novel?