The book unfurls as an extended chase sequence. One day, the old man flees for the forest, the mastiff in pursuit. As he goes further into the woods, he moves deeper into his own past. He encounters “once again the nightmares of the slave-ship holds” and hallucinates “blocks of blood that scatter into shrieks.” He channels the history of the island and of the slave trade. In his mind he plunges into the watery graveyard of the Atlantic: “He sees himself as bone powder transforming into seaweed and rusty chain links. He sees skulls sheltering translucid fish.”

“Slave Old Man” is a cloudburst of a novel, swift and compressed — but every page pulses, blood-warm. “Literature in a living place must be taken alive,” Chamoiseau once wrote.

The prose is so electrifyingly synesthetic that, on more than one occasion, I found myself stopping to rub my eyes in disbelief. Chamoiseau writes “with both studied care and fond disrespect for words,” according to the book’s translator, Linda Coverdale. He jumbles together Creole and French — bricolage is his ethic and his aesthetic. “You can’t go to a library and find out what really happened in Martinique,” he once said. “You have to go to the oral tradition. For the people who were dominated, there is no history, no past. These people don’t have a voice. The Europeans tell our story. So you have to go to the storyteller.”

Image Zora Neale Hurston Credit... Carl Van Vechten, via Library of Congress

This is the technique of “Barracoon” — and was, for a long time, its major liability in finding a publisher. In 1927, Hurston, at the behest of a mentor, the anthropologist Franz Boas, went straight to the storyteller, traveling to Alabama to interview the 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis, the last living African brought to America aboard a slave ship. (“Barracoon” is a word for the barracks built near the coast, where the enslaved were kept until they boarded the ships.)

The book was completed almost a century ago. Publishers considered her use of dialect too alienating, and there was a worry that the blunt description of Africans selling their own into slavery was too incendiary.

Hurston herself is present only at the edges of the narrative, but she is unmistakable. She is most beloved for her novels, particularly “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” but she was also a gifted folklorist, and the qualities that distinguished her are on display in this early work: her patience, persistence and charisma; her ability to read her subjects; her tact. She has an unerring instinct of when to push Lewis — and when to slip away and leave him to his memories. She brings him gifts and company. They talk over “a marvelous mess of blue crabs,” “excellent late melons” and huge quantities of clingstone peaches.