Chronique des sept misères, Chamoiseau's first novel, establishes many of the key concerns which will be further explored in his later writings. It deals throughout, and in a very direct way, with the confrontation between memory and oblivion, and presents a pessimistic diagnosis of the possibilities for memory, and hence self-knowledge, in contemporary Martinique. The novel is structured around a fall from grace: it traces the island's transition from an economy based on the local Creole market in the early twentieth century to its brutal entry into the world of modernity, consumerism and global capital in the aftermath of World War II. In many ways, this is a move from diversity to uniformity, a decline signalled even in the names of the French supermarkets (Prisunic; Monoprix) springing up on the island. In this new world of consumerism and non-production, the local market has been usurped by global economic interests; the instinctive, wily knowledge of the collective protagonists, the djobeurs, along with the ‘agencement imperceptible’ of the marketplace, have become surplus to requirements. Thus, in its concern with the Western values of development and progress Chronique des sept misères – whose title will echo in two later works, Elmire des sept bonheurs and Biblique des derniers gestes – inaugurates a body of work which will be consistently critical of the stifling of Creole culture by the (neo)colonial process.