The title of Arion’s large and powerful Carribean novel refers to an epic open-air game of dominoes, which lasts all afternoon and into the evening. Though it is ostensibly a relaxed and friendly occasion, underlying suspicions, jealousies and conflicts gradually surface. The game culminates in murder and suicide under the glare of public attention.


The two men on the winning team, Janchi and Chamon, are involved in adulterous relationships with the wives of their opponents, the host Bubu Fiel, a taxi-driver, and Manchi, a pompous bailiff. With great skill Arion reveals the past history and underlying motivations of the four players at the same time as creating a convincing atmosphere of heat and squalor and painting an affectionate but critical picture of Curaçao society.


The book is dedicated significantly to ‘women of courage’. In the novel it is Solema, who eventually leaves Manchi for Janchi Pau, who most clearly represents the courage, vision and energy required to emancipate the island from the colonial yoke and subservience to multinational oil companies. However, Bubu’s wife Nora, with her determination to secure an education at any cost for her bright son and constant desperate efforts to ward off impending financial disaster, exhibits her own, humbler kind of heroism.


The characters are stereotypes but effectively drawn and the explicit post-colonial political agenda (the Carribean island of Curaçao is a Dutch dependency, and Dutch is still an official language there) does not detract from the liveliness of the action. The author’s deliberately formal style contrasts with the snatches of his native creole, Papiamento. It gives a unique flavour to the book, whose classical force the author has yet to surpass in any of its successors.

Between Blenheim, the seventeenth-century Jewish cemetery, and Campo Alegre lies Wakota, a suburb of Willemstad. It is situated ‘entre medio’, as Curaçaoans reply when asked how they’re doing. ‘Oh, ‘entre medio’, in between,’ which usually means between the devil and the deep blue sea.

The tourist guides often mention the Jewish cemetery, but are as silent as the grave about the flourishing whores’ camp on the north side of the island. The whores’ camp is a lively hotel with some hundred and fifty rooms, where one can find female guests from all over the Caribbean, South and Central America.

So, pack up your troubles and visit Curaçao! The sea is beautiful, the air is pure and the women in the camp are healthy, being examined daily by a hotel doctor and given injections. And if you go, just for the hell of it look in at Wakota, that peaceful village where the houses are still a long way apart.

People there will remember that until recently four men in this neighbourhood played a game of dominoes every Sunday at the house of one of them, Bubu Fiel. They always started the game at about one o’clock, after their sòpi di mondongo, or tripe soup, the typical Sunday lunch dish of the inhabitants of Curaçao. They stopped at about six o’clock, when dusk, and shortly afterwards inexorable darkness fell.’ (p. 3, tr. Paul Vincent)