SOURCE: A review of Pays mêlé suivi de Nanna-Ya, in World Literature Today, Vol. 60, No. 4, Autumn, 1986, p. 679.

Wylie is an American educator, editor, and critic who specializes in Francophone African literature. In the following review of Pays mêlé suivi de Nanna-ya, he criticizes the work's essayistic prose style and the bleakness of its vision.

The two stories of [Maryse Condé's] Pays mêlé present a literature of genealogy in which social relations are more important than individuals; the interpretation of the past is charged with political significance. Both stories follow Caribbean families through several generations. Individuals come and go so quickly the reader may be disoriented, until he sees that Condé is primarily interested in the web of connections between parents and children, blacks, whites and mulattoes, the powerful and les misérables. Most of the characters are female and emotionally crippled. Trauma and resulting...