Sandra Benitez’s A Place Where the Sea Remembers

Published in 1993, A Place Where the Sea Remembers was the first novel of Sandra Benitez. It won the Minnesota Book Award in 1994, and the book focuses on the residents of a peasant neighborhood in Santiago in the 1980s.

The novel reads like linked short stories for most of the book, but ties together as a complete arc. Each chapter focuses on a different character and dips into the lives of the others, which is how the story moves forward chronologically.

Set in the 1980s, the setting of Santiago is never explicitly named as Santiago, Chile, and the book in no way explores the political backdrop of Chile in the ‘80s. I wondered at the complete absence of the effects of military coups, uprisings, and violence on the characters, and when I finished the book and read the blurb on the back cover, I discovered this Santiago was supposed to be in Mexico. Ah ha.

Benitez displays some lovely writing: “Rhythmically the waves reached her, wetting first her toes, and then her ankles and finally her calves. She looked out to sea and tossed a sapphire-tinted flower onto each new cresting wave.” However, the descriptions are on the thin side and so are the characterizations. At a spare 163 pages, with more than half a dozen characters, in a first novel this is likely a result of the writer’s still-developing skill. It is tricky, however, to create fully rendered characters from another culture, particularly one with a colonial context and a third-world economy. The result can be caricatures, racist depictions, or stock descriptions of things like peasant superstition—and, in fact, the novel hinges on spells and superstition. That said, I love books that delve into the mystical and magic, such as some of the work of Alice Hoffman or the profound work of Angela Carter’s adult feminist fairy tales.

Christina Garcia provides the cover blurb from The Washington Post Book World, “Profound in its simplicity and rhythm…a quietly stunning work that leaves soft tracks in the heart.” And Garcia is right. It is simple, and the rhythms are lovely. However, I wonder about how the publishing landscape has changed in the twenty years since this first novel was published relative to how high the bar is for first-time novelists now. That said, I enjoyed the book. The characters and setting were emotionally compelling, the structure was smart, and I appreciate first hand how difficult a first novel is to write. Benitez has since published three other novels and a memoir, and it will be both interesting and enjoyable to see how her work has developed in time.

Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side

I really can’t come up with enough superlatives for the work of Sebastian Barry. Reading Barry’s novels reminds me of why I love to read. Reading gives me a blueprint for life: The beautiful, the sensual, the historical, the smart, the wise, the good, the bad, the evil, the complexities of man, love, and nature—a good book teaches you how to navigate it all. Sebastian Barry’s work does that.

Sometimes in life, “You can be expert in things you’d rather not be expert in.” Sometimes though, you need a set of instructions: “She has written out the recipe…[and] well, that is the purpose of cooking. The great purpose. It’s all about friendship.” The same can be said of Barry’s immaculately crafted novels that burgeon with everything that matters.

One of the intriguing things about Barry’s work is how it always explores what it is like to be on the other side, the losing side, the outsider, “the Other”.

Barry is an Irish novelist, and in On Canaan’s Side, he revisits the Dunne family, the patriarch of which was an Irish loyalist police officer. I first became acquainted with the Dunne’s in his 2002 novel, Annie Dunne, where he took us on the journey of the homely daughter who has no place without a husband and a father. In On Canaan’s Side, Annie’s sister Lilly narrates her own story at the age of 89, and what a shocking story it is. In Lilly’s life, we read the stories of Ireland and America itself in just 256 pages. The book tackles politics, four generations of war, complex race issues, and wallops the reader with a doozy of a surprise.  Dense and nuanced, but at the same time a light page turner: It’s rare, and here it is. In On Canaan’s Side, the reader will find gorgeous prose, a great plot, and a body of work that builds upon itself and upon history itself.

The award-winning author of more than a dozen plays, two volumes of poetry, and seven novels, his work makes me want to do a PhD in Irish literature, because I can’t even begin to unpack it here. Meanwhile, my mother emailed me this morning that she wants to buy this house in Ireland with its spectacular view of the sea.

“There is such solace in the mere sight of water. It clothes us delicately in its blowing salt and scent, gossamer items that mediate the poor soul. Oh yes I am thinking the human soul is a very slight thing, and not much evolution has gone into it I fear. It is a vague slight notion with not even a proper niche in the body. And yet is the only thing that God will measure.”

And so I’ll simply say this:  Read Sebastian Barry.

Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings

“Slowly, the movement away from the creative, and toward the creativity of money, was becoming increasingly visible.”

The setting: New York City. Where else?

Meg Wolitzer’s novel chronicles the lives of a group of friends from their precocious adolescence to their late middle age, focusing on the dynamics of friendship–and the dynamics of talent and money.

Wolitzer has four previous novels to her name, and The Interestings, released in hardcover in April of this year, weighs in at a hefty 486 pages and carries a blurb by Jeffrey Eugenides. He compares Wolitzer to Virginia Woolf in The Waves, so I paid attention. Four weeks after beginning the book, I’m still paying attention.

The Interestings is  an example of skilled story telling, it explores interesting themes, and the characters are so fully rendered that it feels as if you know these people. The novel is constructed soundly and smartly.

It didn’t take me nearly a month to read The Interestings, however, because I was so interested in it. Rather, the characters on the page were so real, I tired of listening in on their lives every night, and I didn’t feel a strong emotional connection to any of them; however, the key themes of the book do make it worth reading, and I know others who have read the book in a weekend and found it captivating.  Here’s how the book works:

The story opens at a summer camp for elite teenagers interested in the arts in 1974. Jules, the scholarship kid from the ‘burbs, is the main protagonist of the story, and, through her, Wolitzer explores how talent, luck, and money change everything. In short, Jules doesn’t have enough of any of those things.

Jules’ friends Ash & Ethan, however, have each of those things in big supply. Ash is the tall, lithe, beautiful daughter of a Park Avenue financier interested in feminist theater. Ethan is the homely son of a broken family, who makes up for his background by creating a brilliant world of animation that will change American entertainment.

There is also a host of peripheral characters. Jonah, the gay son of a famous folk singer, comes of age during the time that AIDS was a death sentence. Yet it was the damage he faced as a child at the hands of careless adults that caused the real harm. The damage done to children is another big theme of this book, however Wolitzer uses a light touch, and each character will face their own personal tragedies, big and small. Money and talent affects those tragedies. It is friendship, however, that plays the role of the hero in this book. For this reason alone, the book is worth reading.

“Ethan and Ash don’t need kebab specials in their lives anymore. What I really mean is, they don’t need us. If we all met now, we would never become friends. You think they would feel a connection if someone said, ‘Here is a very nice social worker and a very nice ultrasound technician?’”

Or would they feel that connection? The characters beliefs and statements aren’t always correct, and watching each of them help each other to evolve, heal, and understand their lives is rewarding. The book is a wise meditation on the true beauty of friendship.

Wolitzer alludes to key moments in the lives of the characters and the story, and she deftly tacks forward in time and then circles back to delve into the scenes. The novel is divided into three parts, and as it opens at summer camp, so too will it close there. Along the way, it visits interesting corners of New York City’s history, when the city could have gone in one direction or another–to stay a dangerous, crime filled place filled with creative energy, or to become the corporate city-state it is today, a place filled with the wealthy, where creativity has become a commodity. Or is there more to it?

“But what made life in New York odd—not better, and in fact probably worse—was the impression of wealth seeping through everything. New high-end restaurants kept opening; one of them featured lavender in every dish…’In the past, people appreciated artwork. Now artwork appreciates?”

And this is a book to appreciate for the questions it asks. What is true friendship? What role does it play in our lives? Is it better to have a little bit of talent or none at all? Can you ask the same question about money? Or is “better” not the correct word?

Bad things happen, and how we respond to them is not necessarily good, bad, or better. The world changes, and that’s not necessarily good or bad, either. In The Interestings, despite money and genes, all of the characters face the hardest of life’s moments, and we watch them evolve along with the world around them, which is what makes The Interestings an interesting read.