A narrativa autobiográfica de infância: arrebatados pelos sentidos em L'Odeur du Café, de Dany Laferrière

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss a childhood autobiography, L’Odeur du café, of Dany Laferrière, French language writer usually associated with what is known as “migrant literature”. In the first item, we discuss essential theoretical issues in order to define the autobiographical narrative of childhood, taking into consideration the notion of life history and specific elements of the biographic unit, in particular, childhood memories. Next, we present the writer Dany Laferrière and we discuss the context of his cultural and artistic production, characterized by a hybrid type of poetics written in reinvented French. Finally, we present some of the characteristics of L'Odeur du café, such as the predominance of present tense — an unusual fact in the French narrative — the use of a rhetoric of sincerity, some traits of Creole and, finally, some of the associations between the book and elements of Naïf painting.