Idle Talk, Deadly Talk: The Uses of Gossip in Caribbean Literature by Ana Robríguez Navas (review)

Idle Talk, Deadly Talk: The Uses of Gossip in Caribbean Literature by Ana Rodríguez Navas offers an enticing examination of gossip as a foundational and multifaceted strategy in literary texts from the Caribbean since the 1960s. Rodríguez Navas emphasizes gossip's role as a mediating and "mobilizing" (3) force in the "postcolonial, post-authoritarian, multilingual" (3) space of the Caribbean, and she brings to light various fictional and actual scenarios in which gossip has been "weaponized" to contend with the "fraught, unstable" realities of the region (5). A formidable regional study, this book also fills gaps in the some-what sanitized and fairly Anglocentric tradition of scholarship on gossip and demonstrates gossip's crucial role in the evolving historiography of a culturally complex and transnational milieu such as the Caribbean.

Rodríguez Navas is careful to emphasize the heterogeneous functions of gossip and to delineate ways in which she extends the field-defining scholarship of Patricia Meyer Spacks and other scholars working primarily in the Anglophone tradition. Rodríguez Navas departs from these critics by emphasizing gossip's adversarial potential, underlining "the practice's strategic value in postcolonial contexts" (8), and moving beyond the frequently gendered lines of inquiry that organize previous scholarship on gossip and its cultural representations. She stresses that while "gossip's traditional associations with female speech and domesticity are still vividly present," the literature is "full of both men and women who gossip, perhaps because, in the Caribbean, the practice often functions as a pervasive and politicized narrative form intensely bound up in struggle for narrative control" (17). In addition, Rodríguez Navas builds on single-author studies of gossip's role in seminal texts by Caribbean writers, including articles by Carol Bailey, Juan Pablo Dabove, Bénédicte Boisseron, and Nalini Natarajan, and extends partial discussions of gossip in larger projects centered on the Caribbean or other "subaltern" regions (8-9). The resulting work of scholarship is a rigorous and thorough analysis of gossip's formative power in the literature and culture of the region.

Gossip emerges as a destructive and multidirectional force, one that is employed by both the colonizer and the colonized alike and is thus a means of asserting a collective identity in the face of linguistic or cultural hegemony and "a means of tracing the fault lines inherent in Caribbean societies and of staging the fractures and failures of the communities they contain" (29). In the first chapter, Rodríguez Navas describes how, in the case of Gabriel García Marquez's La mala hora (1968) (TheEvilHour [1979]) gossip prompts the dissolution of integral community bonds and, in the case of his Críonica de una muerte anunciada (1982) (Chronicle of a Death Foretold [1990]), it serves as a performative that inhibits any contradictory statement or collective action. Likewise, she highlights gossip's violent propensity to turn inward in her readings of short stories by Roger Mais, Jean Rhys, Luis Rafael Síanchez, Patrick Sylvain, and Luis Negríon. In these stories, gossip destroys relationships; punishes those who do not conform to societal expectations; and excludes, threatens, and attacks more than it serves as a forum for marginalized voices. As an additional example, she indicates how in Antonio José Ponte's La fiesta vigilada (2007), gossip constitutes a veritable panopticon, a "dispersed form of surveillance" (61) that incites unrelenting terror and suspicion and the alienation of townspeople from one another.

In the next chapter, Rodríguez Navas examines texts in which gossip wreaks narrative havoc or rewrites official, "authorized" histories (66). She points to how the characters' conflicting accounts in Rosario Ferre's Maldito amor (1986) and Sweet Diamond Dust (1988) (Ferré's own English translation of the novella) trouble the very possibility of an overarching narrative; how in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) Rhys signals "not just the insufficiency of the master narrative against...