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Summary
Summary
From the best-selling author of Brother, I'm Dying and The Dew Breaker: a stunning new work of fiction that brings us deep into the intertwined lives of a small seaside town where a little girl, the daughter of a fisherman, has gone missing.
Claire Limyè Lanmè--Claire of the Sea Light--is an enchanting child born into love and tragedy in Ville Rose, Haiti. Claire's mother died in childbirth, and on each of her birthdays Claire is taken by her father, Nozias, to visit her mother's grave. Nozias wonders if he should give away his young daughter to a local shopkeeper, who lost a child of her own, so that Claire can have a better life.
But on the night of Claire's seventh birthday, when at last he makes the wrenching decision to do so, she disappears. As Nozias and others look for her, painful secrets, haunting memories, and startling truths are unearthed among the community of men and women whose individual stories connect to Claire, to her parents, and to the town itself. Told with piercing lyricism and the economy of a fable, Claire of the Sea Light is a tightly woven, breathtaking tapestry that explores what it means to be a parent, child, neighbor, lover, and friend, while revealing the mysterious bonds we share with the natural world and with one another. Embracing the magic and heartbreak of ordinary life, it is Edwidge Danticat's most spellbinding, astonishing book yet.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this gorgeous, arresting, and profoundly vivid new novel, Danticat once again tells a story that feels as mysterious and magical as a folk tale and as effective and devastating as a newsreel. Claire Limye Lanme ("Claire of the Sea Light") is turning seven, and yet her birthday has always been marked by both death and renewal. Claire's mother died in childbirth, and she has been raised by her fisherman father in a shack near the sea. The book begins there-in the shack, on the morning of her birthday-before winding back to tell the story of every previous birthday, and who lived, and died, each year. For some time, Claire's father has considered giving her to a wealthy businesswoman who lost her own daughter, and the heartbreaking question of Claire's fate adds to the novel's suspense, as both the past, and this single day, unfold. In the meantime, Danticat (Krik? Krak!) paints a stunning portrait of this small Haitian town, in which the equally impossible choices of life and death play out every day. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Nicole Aragi Agency. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In interlocking stories moving back and forth in time, Danticat weaves a beautifully rendered portrait of longing in the small fishing town of Ville Rose in Haiti. Seven-year-old Claire Faustin's mother died giving birth to her. Each year, her father, Nozias, feels the wrenching need to earn more money than poor Ville Rose can provide and to find someone to care for Claire. Gaelle Lavaud, a fabric shop owner, is a possible mother for the orphaned child, but she is haunted by her own tragic losses. Bernard, who longs to be a journalist and create a radio show that reflects the gang violence of his neighborhood, is caught in the violence himself. Max Junior returns from Miami on a surreptitious mission to visit the girl he impregnated and left years ago and to remember an unrequited love. Louise George, the raspy voice behind a gossipy radio program, is having an affair with Max Senior, head of the local school, and teaches the ethereally beautiful Claire. Their stories and their lives flow beautifully one into another, all rendered in the luminous prose for which Danticat is known. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The best-selling Danticat's (Brother, I'm Dying, 2007) return to fiction after nine years is sure to be highly anticipated--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A Haitian girl vanishes in Edwidge Danticat's novel. AT first, I resisted what appeared to be the fablelike delicacy of Edwidge Danticat's new novel, "Claire of the Sea Light." Was it going to be too precious? Would her lyricism camouflage or ennoble Haiti's life-or-death struggles? But it quickly became apparent that her hypnotic prose was perfectly suited to its setting, the tragic and yet magical seaside town of Ville Rose. Danticat, who now lives in Miami, was born in Port-au-Prince in 1969 but leftHaiti as a child, following her parents to New York . Over the years, she has become the bard of the Haitian diaspora, her concerns shuttling between and straddling two very different worlds. This book, though, is firmly planted in her homeland, in a fictional community whose comings and goings are less closely connected to any earthly immigrant destination than they are to the great beyond. Although billed as a novel, "Claire of the Sea Light" functions in much the same way as the stories in Danticat's powerful 2004 collection "The Dew Breaker," its chapters gradually fitting together into a jigsaw puzzle of entwined lives. The title character is a 7-year-old girl whose mother died giving birth to her, "so her birthday was also a day of death," a day to visit the cemetery every year. Claire goes missing in the first chapter and stays missing until the very last pages , as a portrait of Ville Rose's sometimes beautiful, sometimes brutal reality is painted and a collision of fates inches closer. Claire vanishes on the evening of her birthday, just when her fisherman father, Nozias, who is perpetually contemplating an exodus in search of a better job, appears poised to give her away to one of the town's few well-offresidents. Madame Gaëlle, the proprietor of the local fabric shop, has been talking to him about this plan in the aftermath of her own daughter's death in a car accident . The day of Claire's disappearance had begun with "a freak wave" that killed another of the town's fishermen. Death - natural, accidental, criminal - is such a constant in Ville Rose that it makes perfect sense that the undertaker, resplendent in his elegant beige suits , with his "sad but gorgeous" eyes, should also serve as mayor. There is humor here alongside grief. Danticat's work, lightly peppered with Creole, studded with observations familiar to those who know Haiti, opens itself to a broader readership through her deftintertwining of the specific and the universal. In "Claire of the Sea Light," for example, there is a flashback to the fabric vendor's pregnancy, a time when, moody and frightened and intermittently selfloathing, she forces herself to swallow a dead frog. Over time, such fantastical particulars serve to enrich her image as a woman assailed by love, loss and loneliness. Elsewhere, in a heartbreaking scene, she considers sleeping with the man who, years before, killed her daughter in that traffic accident : "She wondered whether their coming together in this way - to love rather than kill - might resolve everything at last. Might her looking down at his sorrowful face, and his being in her sorrowful bed, help them both take back that moment on the road?" In and out of bedrooms, graveyards, restaurants and bars, even the local radio station , Danticat creates rich and varied interior lives for her characters. The one voice that didn't ring entirely true belonged to the child, Claire. Yet this proved only a slight disappointment because it quickly became clear that Ville Rose, rather than Claire, is the novel's true protagonist. Since "The Dew Breaker" appeared, Edwidge Danticat has written a family memoir ("Brother, I'm Dying") and a young adult novel, and edited several anthologies, including the wonderful "Haiti Noir." "Claire of the Sea Light" represents her return to adult fiction after a hiatus of far too many years. CLAIRE OF THE SEA LIGHT By Edwidge Danticat 238 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95. Deborah Sontag, an investigative reporter for The Times, was a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist for her coverage of the Haitian earthquake. Aimee Bender
Guardian Review
Set in a fictional coastal town in Haiti, Claire of the Sea Light opens on Claire's seventh birthday, before Danticat leads us into the lives of other characters in Ville Rose: the fabric vendor Gaelle; the radio newswriter Bernard, whose loose connection to gang members has terrible consequences; Bernard's close friend Max Junior, an affluent young man who commits a crime against the family's cook, Flore, in order to hide a truth about himself that he shouldn't have to conceal; Louise George, the popular radio presenter who has been having an affair with Max Junior's father. Danticat's interconnected tales bring this book closer to a novel than a short-story collection, and show a town scarred by violence, corruption, class disparities and social taboo. Yet this is also a town of hope, dreams, love and sensuality. Love leads to violence, dreams lead to corruption. The triteness of the "for every darkness there is light" defence of places that have something rotten at their core is expertly revealed. If the core is rotten, Danticat knows, everything beautiful will be touched by blight. Kamila Shamsie - Kamila Shamsie Set in a fictional coastal town in Haiti, Claire of the Sea Light opens on Claire's seventh birthday, before Danticat leads us into the lives of other characters in Ville Rose: the fabric vendor Gaelle; the radio newswriter Bernard, whose loose connection to gang members has terrible consequences; Bernard's close friend Max Junior, an affluent young man who commits a crime against... - Kamila Shamsie.
Kirkus Review
Danticat's first fiction in nine years (The Dew Breaker, 2004, etc.): a snapshot of 21st-century Haiti in the form of stories unfolding around a little girl in the coastal town of Ville Rose. Claire's mother died in childbirth, and on the evening of her seventh birthday in 2009, her father, Nozias, a poor fisherman, agrees to give her to Madame Galle, an affluent fabric vendor whose own daughter died three years earlier in a traffic accident. Claire runs off to think things over, and the narrative circles back to chronicle Galle's pregnancy and the death of her husband in a random gang shooting. From there, we travel to Cit Pendue, a festering slum on the outskirts of Ville Rose, where Bernard Dorien's tentative steps toward a better life are violently halted after he is accused of complicity in that shooting. The intricate, sometimes-intimate interconnections between rich and poor in a small town are evident in the story of Bernard's friend Max Ardin Jr., son of the elite local private school's arrogant proprietor, and Flore, the family's maid, whom he raped and impregnated 10 years earlier. Flore gets her revenge by exposing his crime on the popular local radio program Di Mwen--Creole for "tell me." (Danticat makes evocative use of Creole's distinctive French/African cadences throughout, and the novel's title translates her protagonist's full Creole name, Claire Limy Lanm.) Louise George, host of Di Mwen, has her own reasons for humiliating the Ardins; motivations are never simple in Danticat's nuanced presentation. Her prose has the shimmering simplicity of a folk tale and the same matter-of-fact acceptance of life's cruelties and injustices. Yet, despite the unsparing depiction of a corrupt society in which the police are as brutal and criminal as gang members, there's tremendous warmth in Danticat's treatment of her characters, who are striving for human connection in a hard world. Both lyrical and cleareyed, a rare and welcome combination.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Danticat (Brother, I'm Dying) offers a spare story of loss, human failings, great sacrifice, and love. Seven-year-old Haitian Claire -Limye Lanme's mother died in childbirth. The girl's father, Nozias, a fisherman who desperately needs to leave the village to make more money, is struggling with the decision to allow someone else to raise his daughter. He settles on Gaelle Lavaud, a prosperous fabric store owner who lost her own daughter, and tries to convince her to take his. On her seventh birthday, Claire goes missing. Danticat moves backward in time to tell the stories of Claire and her neighbors as the community comes together to find the missing child. Veteran narrator Robin Miles captures the French/Creole pronunciation beautifully and immerses the listener in the setting. VERDICT This beautifully written story transcends its Haitian setting to tell a universal story of human connectedness. ["[Danticat] has the ability to conjure up the rarified air of Haiti as she manages to pull tightly at one's heartstrings; this novel is no exception," read the starred review of the Knopf hc, LJ 9/1/13; one of LJ's Best Books of 2013, see p. 26.]-Judy Murray, Monroe Cty. Lib. Syst., Temperance, MI (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.