L’étoile absinthe (The Absinthe Star) begins with an image of the Caribbean sun––this infra-rouge mass floats in the sky like a large bird, circling the potomitan. Readers of the novel will immediately notice a patch of text on the very first page is missing, as though time were slowly eating away at the final distinguishable traces of Alexis left after he was murdered under the reign of François Duvalier. With this final and incomplete novel, written between 1959 and 1961, readers and critics will be forced to reckon with not only the object of the novel, but also the artist’s vision for the proposed tetralogy of which it was originally a part.