The Farming of Bones

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Edwidge Danticat's first collection of short stories, Krik? Krak!, was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 1995, making her the youngest writer ever nominated for that honor. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, which was a recent Oprah pick, established her as not only a remarkable young talent but also a new and important voice for Haitian Americans. Now, with her latest, Danticat turns to the past, to locate and give a new voice to a moment in history that is an all-but-forgotten holocaust. Her powerful new novel focuses on the 1937 massacre by Dominicans of the Haitians living within their borders.

It is 1937, and Amabelle, orphaned at the age of eight when her parents drowned, is a faithful maidservant of many years to the young Dominican wife of an army colonel. Amabelle's lover, Sebastian Onius, is a field hand, an itinerant sugarcane cutter. They are Haitians, useful to the Dominicans but haunted by the knowledge that they are not entirely welcome. Rumors say that in other towns, Haitians are being persecuted, even killed. But there are always rumors.

Amabelle and Sebastian decide they will marry and return to Haiti at the end of this cane season. But what should be the hope-filled dawn of their new lives together quickly becomes a sudden fall of darkness in the terror and madness of an ordained "ethnic cleansing" ordered by Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo. Betrayed by their inability to speak unaccented Spanish (specifically, their inability to pronounce "parsley"), those who have long lived among the Spanish-speaking Dominican population, as wellasthe impoverished itinerants, are sacrificed to preserve the purity of Dominican culture.

In this, her second novel, Danticat re-creates a vanished world, memorializing these victims of nationalist madness who have long been ignored by the spotlight of world history. The Farming of Bones is about love, fragility, dignity, and the only triumph possible for the persecuted and the innocent: to endure. With quiet lyricism and atmospheric, at times dreamlike prose, juxtaposed with the passion and violence inherent in this epic tragedy, Danticat weaves a tale of insufferable loss and illuminates the hearts and souls of the Haitian people whose way of life was so undervalued. Realizing the promise evident in her two previous works of fiction, The Farming of Bones is a story told in an astonishingly mature voice with the assured hand of a major writer.

From the Publisher

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

"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

William Trevor

[T]he redeeming power of bearing witness.
— The Wall Street Journal

Michael Upchurch

Danticat. . .capably evokes the shock with which a small personal world is disrupted by military mayhem. . . .a spare, searing poetry infuses many of the book's best passages. . . .At times. . .reads like a small-scale Gone with the Wind told from the servants' point of view.
— The New York Times Book Review

Dan Cryer

Pity the young novelist surfing the wave of novelty and hype. Sooner or later, she's going to wipe out. Although Edwidge Danticat has written only a so-so first novel Breath, Eyes, Memory and a modest story collection Krik? Krak!, given all the hoopla, you'd think she was Haiti's great gift to American literature. A prized seat among the literati-in-waiting of Granta Magazine's 20 Best Young American Novelists and a National Book Award nomination for Krik? Krak! Oh, please! Has anyone actually read these books?

The Haitian folk tradition that Danticat brings to the literary table has a certain fascination -- the tangled knot of family connections, the everyday presence of fearsome or whimsical divinities, the overwhelming sense of life's fragility. To this, she adds a contemporary overlay of feminist indignation and political protest. But her plots, alas, are predictable and occasionally static. Her style is as often overwrought as it is pleasingly lyrical. And she can be as preachy and sentimental as Alice Walker at her most embarrassing.

In the history of Danticat's birthplace, the hemisphere's poorest country, it's not only the Yanqui imperialist who has served as villain. The U.S. Army may have stormed in periodically to depose one ruler and install another, but unlike Haiti's next-door neighbor, the Dominican Republic, it hasn't subjected the island to genocidal fury. At the heart of Danticat's new novel, The Farming of Bones, is a little-known massacre ordered by the despot Rafael Trujillo in 1937. Thousands of desperately poor Haitians, lured across the border to work the sugar cane fields, became victims of bloodthirsty Dominican nationalists. "When you stay too long at a neighbor's house," one Haitian observes, "it's only natural that he become weary of you and hate you."

Danticat is so eager to pay tribute to these unsung victims that she neglects to portray any real people. Her characters are mere monuments to remembrance. Amabelle Desir, servant to well-to-do Dominicans, is little more than a gritty survivor her parents drowned years ago in the same river where the massacre takes place. She and her lover, cane cutter Sebastien Onius, are depicted in such broad, all-purpose strokes that it's hard to care, except in the most abstract way, when they flee for their lives toward Haiti. They are hard-working, brave, resourceful -- and utterly forgettable. Minor characters fill required roles wearing the husk of stereotype: the hateful Dominican military officer, his naive wife, the kindly Dominican who warns Amabelle of danger ahead.

This is by far Danticat's longest book, and the stretch shows. Her strategy of keeping the horrors at a distance or in Amabelle's memories of childhood slackens the pace and makes a reader uncertain about what's really going on. Unlike the Holocaust, these are not such familiar historical events that avoiding direct description can actually heighten the tension. Given the life-or-death excitements looming in the background, the book's longueurs are inexcusable. Oddly enough, by slowing things down for a loving -- and uncritical -- evocation of culture and community, Danticat has robbed her book of vitality. Only 29, Danticat has plenty of time to achieve her considerable potential. But overpraising her work won't help her get there. -- Salon

Lori Tharps

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

Brenda E. Campbell

Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones, traverses a landscapes that is simultaneously lush and untamed, dark and predatory. . . it seeks simply, in the quiet retelling of a story, to humanize a tragedy that has been looked at only from a far and then only in relation to other tragedies. . . .Ms. Danticat has once again crafted a novel of significance, a novel that holds no stereotypes and is bound only by a history too soon forgotten. It is a story uncommonly placed in its advocacy of political and social justice because the retelling and the remembering of this holocaust story is its own reward, its own justice. -- Quarterly Black Review

Los Angeles Times

A writer of poetic imagination.

Newsweek

A joy to read.

Mademoiselle

Erotic, devastating.

Miami Herald

Powerful and enduring.

Chicago Tribune

Subtle and wise.

Gayle Hegland

The Farming of bones by Edwige Danticat is set in 1930s village in the Dominican Republic. Anabelle Desir is the narrator of this harrowing testimonial to the atrocities commited by Dominican president Rafael Trujillo's army in 1937, which systematically murdered Haitian emigrants working in the Dominican Republic. Danticat's poetic prose illuminates the people, colors, and customs of Haitian life and made me hope against historical fact that the inevitable carnage would not happen. It is an excurciating and compelling read.
— The Progressive

Library Journal

Haitian-born novelist Danticat, perhaps best known for Krik? Krak! LJ 3/15/95, uses "calm, lyrical, sensual language" to explore the brutal massacre carried out by Dominican president Trujillo. LJ 8/98

School Library Journal

YA-At one time the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic accepted and nurtured their interdependency. Trujillo's racist regime marked the end of this peaceful coexistence with the deplorable Massacre of 1937. This tragic and horrific ethnic cleansing is remembered by Amabelle, an aging Haitian woman who lived through this period as a young girl. Orphaned when her parents are swept away by a swollen river, she is cared for by the Haitian community across the river in the Dominican Republic. Eventually she falls in love with Sebastien Onius, a worker in the cane fields; their lives are forever entangled as the events of 1937 gather them in. She flees, becoming companion and nursemaid for the wife of Senor Pico Duarte, a member of Trujillo's inner circle. For the rest of her life, Amabelle searches for Sebastien, never completely able to accept his death. Danticat's lyrical writing propels readers forward. This is an emotionally charged story and a powerful historical account that helps readers understand the radical division that exists between two countries on a single island.-Dottie Kraft, formerly at Fairfax County Public Schools, VA

William Trevor

[T]he redeeming power of bearing witness. -- The Wall Street Journal

Christopher John Farley

A powerful, haunting novel. -- Time

Zia Jaffrey

Danticat's brilliance as a novelist is that she is able to put [the] event into a credible, human context. -- The Nation

Los Angeles Times

A writer of poetic imagination.

Boston Globe

Wonderful.

Oregonian

Beautiful.

People

Both poetic and graphically realistic, this novel sets the love affair of an orphaned house servant against the backdrop of the 1937 revolution in the Dominican Republic.

Kirkus Reviews

A strong second novel from the Haitian-born author whose debut, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), was an Oprah selection, and whose story collection, Krik? Krak!, won the National Book Award in 1995. Danticat's subject is the 1937 massacre by Dominican islanders of Haitians living within their borders, at the command of Dominican dictator Trujillo—as experienced, and then remembered many years afterward, by the story's narrator, Haitian maidservant Amabelle Desir. In the lyrically written opening section, Amabelle's intimate moments with her lover, sugarcane worker Sebastien Onius (the two of them share memories of their deceased parents), are counterpointed against her submissive relationship with Senora Valencia, the wife of a Dominican army officer whose own loss of a child subtly foreshadows the many disasters to come.

The long middle of the story describes the despised and terrified Haitians' extended march back to their own country, during which Amabelle and Sebastien are separated. In the meditative last third (almost devoid, unfortunately, of dramatic tension), set a quarter-century later, Amabelle finally makes her peace with her bereavement, and, after an emotional reunion with Senora Valencia, passively accepts the fate she's been prepared for by her contemporaries and forebears alike. Danticat tells this sorrowful tale in rich, lush prose that veers, often very suddenly, between rigidly controlled understatement and feverish emotionalism. Her word pictures are extraordinarily precise and compelling, as in a representative description of fires set to clear harvested cane fields: 'The smell of burning soil and molasses invaded the air, dry grass and weedscrackling and shooting sparks, vultures circling low, looking for rats and lizards escaping the blaze.' Though it loses intensity as it proceeds, here's more than sufficient passion, color, and empathy to confirm Danticat's high standing among our more gifted younger writers.