A Place Where the Sea Remembers by Sandra Benitez
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(Paperback)
- Pub. Date: February 1995
- 176pp
- Sales Rank: 82,873
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Product Details
- ISBN-13: 9780671892678
- ISBN: 0671892673
- Edition Number: 1
Synopsis
Winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Fiction
Winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction
Member of the National Writer's Voice Project
Finalist Los Angeles Times Book Award
In A Place Where the Sea Remembers, Sandra Benitez invites us into a mesmerizing world filled with, love and betrayal, tragedy and hope. This rich and bewitching story is a bittersweet portrait of the people in Santiago, a Mexican village by the sea. Chayo, the flower seller, and her husband Candelario, the salad maker, are finally blessed with the child they thought they would never have. Their cause for happiness, however, triggers a chain of events that impact the lives of everyone in their world.
The hopes, triumphs, failures, and shortcomings of the novel's enchanting array of characters create a graceful picture of life that is both a universal portrait and an insider's look at life in Latin America.
Annotation
Winner of the 1993 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award
Publishers Weekly
Latina writer Benitez begins her excellent debut novel with a painful event--the wait for a drowned body to float to shore--and works backwards, retracing the myriad, seemingly insignificant steps that led to the character's death. As in Like Water for Chocolate , this novel sympathetically explores the lives of Mexican women caught in a mystical, fatalistic world. Chayo, a flower seller, and her sister Marta, a chambermaid, live in a poverty-stricken village by the sea. When 15-year-old Marta is raped and becomes pregnant, seemingly barren Chayo and her husband, Candelario, agree to take the child. Soon after, however, Chayo discovers that she too is expectant and reneges on the promise. Livid, Marta arranges with el brujo , the witch doctor, to put a curse on her sister's child. Both women bear sons, and a remorseful Marta tells her sister about the curse, which she claims to have had removed by la curandera , the healer. But when Chayo's son almost dies after being bitten by fire ants, the sisters' relationship once more deteriorates and, inexorably, the tragedy presaged in the book's opening chapter comes to pass. Benitez's unsparing vision into the stark realities of village residents' lives offers a poignant counterpoint to superficial vacation snapshots of Mexico. (Sept.)
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Sandra Benitez
"I spent my life moving between the Latin American culture of my Puerto Rican mother and the Anglo-American culture of my father. I was born on March 26, 1941 in Washington, D.C., one of a pair of identical twins. My sister died only a month after our birth. A year later my parents and I moved to Mexico where another sister was born. My childhood and early adulthood were spent in Mexico and El Salvador. When I think of those years, the images that come to me are awash in the color saffron: the Spanish language, the permeable scent of cedar and leather, the shimmering heat, the color of the women in the household, the stories they told, the lives they shared.
"In Latin America, I learned that life is frail and most always capricious, that people find joy in the midst of insurmountable obstacles, that in the end, it is hope that saves us.
"When I became a teenager, I was sent to live for three years on my paternal grandparents' farm in Northeastern Missouri, and this is where I attended high school. I was the first Latina the people there had ever known. Those years live for me in a pale blue light: the thin sheen the setting sun casts on the snow banks, the color of my father's eyes, the doleful bawl a cow makes when it has lost its calf, the back-breaking work that is the farmer's lot.
"In Missouri, I learned that life is what you make it, and that satisfaction comes with a job well done, that in the end, it is steadfastness that saves us."
"I received my undergraduate and master's degrees from Northeast Missouri State University. Over the years I have been an English, Spanish, and Literature teacher at both high school and university levels. Ihave been a translator, and I have worked in the international division of a major training corporation. I have traveled extensively throughout Latin America. Since 1980, I have been a fiction writer and a creative writing teacher. I have two grown sons and I live with my husband in Minnesota."
"I came to writing late. I was thirty-nine before I gathered enough courage to begin. When I hear other writers talk about writing, I'm amazed by those who say they always knew they had to write. When I was a girl, I never wished to do it. Being a writer was something magical I never dreamed I could attain. But while growing up, I frequently had a book in my lap -- and so I was linked even then to writing and to the spell that stories cast. I didn't know a writing life was lying in store for me. I had to live and grow before I caught the faint call. Since heeding the call, I've worked hard at being faithful to it, for writing is an act of faith. We must keep faith each day with our writing if we want to be called writers.
"Since I've been writing I've searched what's in my heart and its from that core that I write and not from what seems marketable. I am a Latina American. In my heart are stored the stories of my Latin American and Missourian heritage -- of a childhood lived in Mexico and El Salvador. When I write, I have to suppress the knowledge that mainstream America often ignores the stories of 'the other America.' Over the years, I've learned to write from the heart, to persevere despite the setbacks of a host of rejections.
"In the end, I've learned these things about writing: its never too late to begin; we know all we need to know in order to do it; persistence and tenacity will take us all the way. There are angels on our shoulders, be still to catch their whisperings."
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A Place Where the Sea Remembersby Anonymous
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January 10, 2006: WOw..it was an interesting book although i didn't really enjoy it, i finish reading the book anywase....i like it how it's different people in different chapter..i respect your book and would like to tell everyone out there that...it's a great book..you learn from what u read ....
A Place Where the Sea Remembersby Anonymous
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July 19, 2005: this book was a very hard to read because it was not an enjoyable book to read! i would rather shoot my self then be forced to read this again!
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