Intercut with this film script and the often funny backstory of the ageing actors’ lives is a moving novella about Austin’s mother, Madeleine, a servant in a rich French Creole house in Trinidad in the 1940s, and her affair with Austin’s white father, Barto, a colonial narrative that is in its own way as much about a vanishing fantasy life as the world of Hollywood.
There’s still another layer, which readers of Antoni’s Bocas prize-winning As Flies to Whatless Boys will anticipate with pleasure: the presence of wickedly comic metatextual authorial notes and commentary.
Cut Guavas is written in a spirit of fun that nevertheless makes serious points about race in the New World imagination. A master storyteller, Antoni combines its multiple strands in a way that feels both effortless and seamless.