The "double vision" of Caribbean life is portrayed in the life of Aldrick who is caught between generational and cultural conflicts. And all of this during Carnival! The Dragon Can't Dance was almost prophetic in the depiction of the commercialization of Mas. Change always brings choice and Lovelace's characters highlight the necessary pain that comes with any decision.

I loved this book so much that I recommended it to all my family and friends. Earl Lovelace captured everything that Carnival means for Trini people. The characters are so real that the faces that I chose to see them as, were faces of people that I actaully knew in my family. LOL. This novel will make all readers want to take a trip to Trinidad and experience life there. This book is just too sweet for words!!!!

In this lyrically written novel, Earl Lovelace introduces us to the Hill, a poor community just outside Trinidad's capital Port-of-Spain. The people in this community leave behind their daily suffering to celebrate wildly the two-day festival that is Carnival. Through "playing mas," each of the text's central character finds sustenance to endure the rest of the year; the characters they play inform how they see themselves the rest of the year. Fisheye, a badjohn, joins the neighborhood gang violence that characterized early steelpan culture. Miss Cleothilde, a mulatto, plays queen for two days but reigns over the community for the entire year. Aldrick, the text's main protagonist, plays dragon. In doing so, he sees himself as a warrior, carrying on the traditions of manhood established for him by the men before him. However, as the culture changes, Aldrick must re-evaluate what playing the dragon really means.

This is a fabulous novel, written in a style reminiscent of calypso music. Lovelace weaves a tale that explains so much about Caribbean culture and the need for its people to be seen and validated by others. A must read for anyone interested in Caribbean literature and culture.

The novel Salt (Faber 1996) has won the 1997 Commonwealth Writer's Prize which probably comes as no surprise to the Caribbean reader, for Earl Lovelace is a highly acclaimed and tried writer from Trinidad. He is noted for a profoundly lyrical and ecstatic style which imbues the ordinary with the magic of hope. Ensconsed in the landscape of the island, the novel Salt weaves the stories of some familiar characters like Miss Myrtle and Bango with some new and yet untold stories, particularly those of Caribbean politicians hailing from a rainbow of ethnic backgrounds. These men have been given a mandate after independence to change the social structure of the island, but are shown to be ineffectual, bombastic, idealistic, confused. Lovelace' touch is as usual however compassionate. He is deeply insightful of the misfit between the aspirations of political figures and the resources of the island, which are rooted in his narrative with a connection to Africa. This is embodied in the figure of an old stickfighter Bango who knows and tells the stories of the island, but who is also shown to point a way forward with his annual multi-ethnic parade of children. Bango carries the weight of the island's past with a conviction of his own belief in the value of a community of feeling, which makes the politician's plans all the more heavy, foreign, absurd, misguided. And so, contrasting village folk with the urban politician, a characteristic distinction made in Caribbean and African literature, Lovelace writes urgently of the need to recover the past in a way which can fill the present more meaningfully, to erase the loss which came with the forced movement of peoples across the Atlantic, to even come to re-remember that there has been that loss. This central narrative is spun around another one of the relationship between women and men, and between mothers and sons. The men appear in the active dreams of the women, especially the single women. Yet the women in the everyday world are seen to support, advise, guide the men. The mutualities within these relationships as evoked in Salt is perhaps not politically correct yet is conveyed as a reality nevertheless. It is hard to capture in this short review the depth of feeling that Lovelace brings to these characters, in their small actions, their few words, and their large as life troubles. This book is therefore highly recommended to those interested in new literature of change, protest, and celebration

THE SCHOOLMASTER is just a story. It is a moment in time for a peasant village in Trinidad and it is as beautiful as it is raw. "....and the donkey that had made the most runs between Kumaca and Valencia began to bray and broke into a trot and surprised the acolyte on its back who was completing his first trip." A moment in time where stories are starting and others are playing out. We are party to only one and it is enough. TEN STARS!