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Danticat, Edwidge The Farming of Bones ISBN 13: 9781616953492

The Farming of Bones - Softcover

 
9781616953492: The Farming of Bones
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It is 1937, the Dominican side of the Haitian border. Amabelle, orphaned at the age of eight when her parents drowned, is a maid to the young wife of an army colonel. She has grown up in this household, a faithful servant. Sebastien is a field hand, an itinerant sugarcane cutter. They are Haitians, useful to the Dominicans but not really welcome. There are rumors that in other towns Haitians are being persecuted, even killed. But there are always rumors. Amabelle loves Sebastien. He is handsome despite the sugarcane scars on his face, his calloused hands. She longs to become his wife and walk into their future. Instead, terror enfolds them. But the story does not end here: it begins. "The Farming of Bones" is about love, fragility, barbarity, dignity, remembrance, and the only triumph possible for the persecuted: to endure.

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Review:
Orphaned narrator Amabelle Désir works as a housemaid for a powerful military man who becomes her enemy, and her best and only childhood friend Valencia--his wife. Amabelle is Haitian, working by force of necessity in the Dominican Republic, and in love with Sebastian Onius, a migrant Haitain "farmer of bones" (cane-cutter) and vanquisher of the nightmares that drag her into the land of the dead.

Cut off from her family and homeland by the river that forms the riven border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic ("Heaven--my heaven--is the veil of water that stands between my parents and me. To step across it and then come out is what makes me alive."), Amabelle's life condenses a metaphor for the incipient civil war between "two different peoples trying to share one tiny piece of land." Like all civil wars, this one begins in the family. Caught up in the bloody events of the Haitain Massacre of 1937, Amabelle is faced with the dilemma of choosing between a beloved friend whose people become her persecutors and a lover of her own nation who seeks to open her eyes to stark political realities. Language, Amabelle learns, is the key to these realities in a land where pronunciation of the name of a common herb marks a person out for murder, encapsulated by the story of the Dominican Generalissimo chasing a Haitian worker in the cane fields:

"The Generalissimo had him in plain sight and could have shot him in the parsley, but he did not because ... he had a realisation. Your people did not trill their r the way we do, or pronounce the jota. 'You can never hide as long as there is parsley nearby,' the Generalissimo is believed to have said. 'On this island, you walk too far and people speak a different language. Their own words reveal who belongs on what side.' "
Making a friend of language, Edwidge Danticat places herself on the side of the power of remembrance, at whose service she places her uncommon gift of writing poetic prose infused by exact and suspenseful storytelling. In The Farming of Bones Danticat returns to the land of her birth and retraces the lifelines of memory that have been rubbed away by decades of displacement. She reaps a harvest that offers history a fable of survival. --Rachel Holmes
Review:
Praise for The Farming of Bones

A New York Times Notable Book
ALA Booklist Editor's Choice

"One of the Best Books of the Year"--Publishers Weekly

"Heartrending."
--Walter Mosely, Entertainment Weekly

"A powerful, haunting novel ... every chapter cuts deep, and you feel it."
--Time

"Danticat ... is a brilliant storyteller. Her language is simple, gorgeous, and enticing. Her perfect pacing and seamless narrative ... make each character's destiny seem inexorable."
--Time Out New York

"[With] hallucinatory vigor and a sense of mission ... Danticat capably evokes the shock with which a small personal world is disrupted by military mayhem.... The Farming of Bones offers ample confirmation of Edwidge Danticat's considerable talents."
--The New York Times Book Review

"A passionate story ... Richly textured, deeply personal details particularize each of Danticat's characters and give poignancy to their lives. Often, her tales take on the quality of a legend."
--The Seattle Times

"A beautiful and tragic book ... Danticat startles and enraptures readers once again with The Farming of Bones, a novel so mature in its exposition, so captivating in its spirit that it perpetually astonishes the reader in every remarkable chapter."
--The Orlando Sentinel

"Danticat ... infuses the dreamlike prose of her earlier works with a politicized resonance in her second novel. ... An eyeopening and delicately written testimonial to the 'nameless and faceless' who died in a historically overlooked conflict."
--The Wall Street Journal

"Because the larger themes of trauma and collective memory are in the hands of a gifted fiction writer, the novel cannot be summarized by casual reference to genocidal fact. Indeed, some of the most interesting writers today--Toni Morrison in Paradise, Caryl Phillips in Cambridge--are blending history and fiction, imparting information, in the manner of nineteenth century novelists, without seeming to.... A beautifully conceived work, with monumental themes."
--The Nation

"Steely, nuanced ... it's a testament to Danticat's skill that Amabelle's musical, sorrowing voice never falters."
--The New Yorker

"A surprisingly subtle and wise book."
--Chicago Tribune

"An admirable, even brilliant, work by an author of tremendous talent ... a story that will haunt both the mind and the soul."
--The Denver Post

"Exquisite ... Passionate and heartrending, Bones lingers in the consciousness like an unforgettable nightmare."
--Entertainment Weekly

"An erotic, devastating tale ... Danticat ... lets us feel the pain and hope of Amabelle's journey, using language that's poetic and understated all at once."
--Madamoiselle

"A beautiful book. Danticat's writing is superb, drifting easily from the visionary and ecstatic to the bare and simple notice of things as they are."
--The Sunday Oregonian

"Stunning both as revelation of a forgotten atrocity and as demonstration of narrative craft."
--The Cleveland Plain-Dealer

"Danticat gives us fully realized characters who endure their lives with dignity, a sensuously atmospheric setting and a perfectly paced narrative written in prose that is lushly poetic and erotic, specifically detailed ... and starkly realistic. While this novel is deeply sad, it is infused with Danticat's fierce need to bear witness."
--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

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  • PublisherSoho Press
  • Publication date2013
  • ISBN 10 1616953497
  • ISBN 13 9781616953492
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages336
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9781569471265: The Farming of Bones

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ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9781569471265
Publisher: Soho Pr Inc, 1998
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  • 9780349111636: The Farming Of Bones

    Abacus, 2000
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  • 9780140280494: The Farming of Bones

    Penguin, 1999
    Softcover

  • 9780786217328: The Farming of Bones

    Thornd..., 1999
    Hardcover

  • 9780349111643: The Farming Of Bones

    Abacus, 1999
    Softcover

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