Xavier’s addiction isn’t to anything so mundane as alcohol or heroin, but instead to moth eating. Xavier is finding it difficult to cook for anyone, much less a pompous politician - he is resistant to being pushed around, his wife has died and he is in a wrestling match with addiction. But Popisho, the fictional island namesake of her third novel, is formed as much from fearless imagination as real-world Caribbean geography. Ross was born in England of Jamaican-Scottish ancestry, and while she has built her career as a journalist, poet, editor, academic and novelist in the U.K., she was raised in Jamaica.
Sure, on a basic level, every story has been told before and will be told again, but the novels I’ve found the most urgent and fascinating are so specific to their authors that they couldn’t have been written by anyone else.Ĭase in point: Leone Ross’s fantastic new novel, “Popisho.” No one will persuade me that this bold, iridescent butterfly of a story could have landed on anyone’s shoulder but Ross’s. The idea lends a sense of urgency to the writing process - quick, write that novel before someone else does! Or maybe it provides the hope that inspiration is plentiful and free and waiting to be plucked out of the air. In the writers’ world, I’ve encountered the notion that ideas are like butterflies, landing softly on this shoulder or that brow and, if the writer is not quick enough, flitting off to find another, more receptive mind.
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