The Farming of Bones
by Edwidge Danticat
List Price:
Our Price: $8.46
You Save: $7.54 (47%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $4.20 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Edwidge DanticatEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-09-01
ISBN: 0140280499
Number of pages: 312
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780140280494
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Farming of Bones
Book Review: An unfamiliar familiar story
Summary: 5 Stars
In "The Farming of Bones," the fictional Dominican town of Alégria is the setting for Edwidge Danticat's evocation of the 1937 massacre of Haitian workers ordered by the Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo. Through the voice of Amabelle Désir, a young woman who works as a maid for a well-to-do family, Danticat conveys not only the horrific events of the massacre itself, but also the lives of young Haitians desperate to earn money in the Dominican cane fields that will allow them to escape the most abject poverty and perhaps return to a better life on the other side of the divided island. Much of the imagery in the novel thus conveys duality: blackness and whiteness; the juxtaposition of life and death; the birth of twins, and so on.
More disturbing, however, is the novel's depiction of the almost casual way in which a peaceable society descends into slaughter. "The Farming of Bones" begins not with one incident (the kindly Senora Valencia giving birth) but with two. The second incident occurs simultaneously, but with greater portent. Speeding homeward, her husband, Senor Pico, a Dominican military officer, strikes a young Haitian worker with his car and kills him, yet stops only briefly, without bothering to ascertain what has happened. These stories are intertwined, since they establish a pattern that is repeated: people like Senora Valencia mean well, but they are powerless to stop the progress of a government-sponsored campaign of hatred backed by military force. Later in the novel, the bravery of two priests who attempt to protect a group of Haitian workers and the courage of Amabelle's lover, Sebastien, are admirable, but they are as nothing in the face of genocide. "The Farming of Bones" tells a story of an historical event little known to Americans, but the elements of this story are familiar to anyone, so often are they repeated.
Summary of The Farming of Bones
From the bestselling author of Breath, Eyes, Memory, a passionate and profound novel of two lovers struggling against political violenceThe Farming of Bones begins in 1937 in a village on the Dominican side of the river that separates the country from Haiti. Amabelle Desir, Haitian-born and a faithful maidservant to the Dominican family that took her in when she was orphaned, and her lover Sebastien, an itinerant sugarcane cutter, decide they will marry and return to Haiti at the end of the cane season. However, hostilities toward Haitian laborers find a vitriolic spokesman in the ultra-nationalist Generalissimo Trujillo who calls for an ethnic cleansing of his Spanish-speaking country. As rumors of Haitian persecution become fact, as anxiety turns to terror, Amabelle and Sebastien's dreams are leveled to the most basic human desire: to endure. Based on a little-known historical event, this extraordinarily moving novel memorializes the forgotten victims of nationalist madness and the deeply felt passion and grief of its survivors.
* New York Times Notable Book
* Named one of the Best Books of the Year by People, Entertainment Weekly, Chicago Tribune, Time Out New York, Publishers Weekly, and the American Library Association
* The author was nominated for a National Book Award and named one of the "20 Best Young Novelists" by Granta
"A remarkable new novel . . . Danticat writes in wonderful, evocative prose, and she is especially adept at treading the path between oppression and grace. At times, it's a particularly painful path, but, always, a compelling one." --The Boston Sunday Globe
"[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
"It's a testament to her talent that the novel, while almost unbearably sad, is still a joy to read." --Newsweek
Penguin Readers Guide Available
In a 1930s Dominican Republic village, the scream of a woman in labor rings out like the shot heard around Hispaniola. Every detail of the birth scene--the balance of power between the middle-aged Señora and her Haitian maid, the babies' skin color, not to mention which child is to survive--reverberates throughout Edwidge Danticat's Farming of Bones. In fact, rather than a celebration of fecundity, the unexpected double delivery gels into a metaphor for the military-sponsored mass murder of Haitian emigrants. As the Señora's doctor explains: "Many of us start out as twins in the belly and do away with the other."
But Danticat's powerful second novel is far from a currently modish victimization saga, and can hold its own with such modern classics as One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Color Purple. Its watchful narrator, the Señora's shy Haitian housemaid, describes herself as "one of those sea stones that sucks its colors inside and loses its translucence once it's taken out into the sun." An astute observer of human character, Amabelle Désir is also a conduit for the author's tart, poetic prose. Her lover, Sebastian, has "arms as wide as one of my bare thighs," while the Señora's complicit officer husband is "still shorter than the average man, even in his military boots."
The orphaned Amabelle comes to assume almost messianic proportions, but she is entirely fictional, as is the town of Alegría where the tale begins. The genocide and exodus, however, are factual. Indeed, the atrocities committed by Dominican president Rafael Trujillo's army back in 1937 rival those of Duvalier's Touton Macoutes. History has rendered Trujillo's carnage much less visible than Duvalier's, but no less painful. As Amabelle's father once told her, "Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of." Thanks to Danticat's stellar novel, the world will now know. --Jean Lenihan
Historical Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in Historical Books
Pirate Latitudes: A Novelby Michael Crichton
Harper; Published: 2009-11-24; Roughcut; Book
Best price: $2.49
Price in other shops:
The Master Butchers Singing Club: A Novelby Louise Erdrich
Harper Perennial; Published: 2004-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.83
Price in other shops:
The Last Witchfinder: A Novelby James Morrow
William Morrow; Published: 2006-03-14; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $4.00
Price in other shops:
Zorroby Isabel Allende
HarperAudio; Published: 2005-05-03; Audio CD; Book
Best price: $3.09
Price in other shops:
The Hot Kid: A Novelby Elmore Leonard
William Morrow; Published: 2005-05-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $2.89
Price in other shops:
The Last Kingdom (The Saxon Chronicles Series #1)Mass Market Paperback; Book
Bones of the Hills (Conqueror, Book 3)by Conn Iggulden
Harper Collins Canada; Published: 2008; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $44.70
Marchby Geraldine Brooks
Penguin Books; Published: 2006; Paperback; Book
Emperor (Emperor 1)by Conn Iggulden
Harpercollins Pb; Published: 2003-06-07; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.80
Girl With a Pearl Earringby Tracy Chevalier
Harper Collins Audio; Published: 2002-06-17; Audio Cassette; Book
Best price: $86.82
Similar Books and other products
The God of Small Things: A Novelby Arundhati Roy
Random House Trade Paperbacks; Published: 2008-12-16; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.87
Price in other shops:
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Vintage Contemporaries)by Edwidge Danticat
Vintage; Published: 2011-09-20; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.75
Price in other shops:
The Dew Breakerby Edwidge Danticat
Vintage; Published: 2005-03-08; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.67
Price in other shops:
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolutionby C.L.R. James
Vintage; Published: 1989-10-23; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.96
Price in other shops:
No Telephone to Heavenby Michelle Cliff
Plume; Published: 1996-03-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.99
Price in other shops:
The Final Passageby Caryl Phillips
Vintage; Published: 1995-10-31; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.79
Price in other shops:
Lucy: A Novelby Jamaica Kincaid
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Published: 2002-09-04; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.65
Price in other shops:
A Small Placeby Jamaica Kincaid
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Published: 2000-04-28; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.88
Price in other shops:
In the Time of the Butterfliesby Julia Alvarez
Algonquin Books; Published: 2010-01-12; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.00
Price in other shops:
Breath, Eyes, Memory (Oprah's Book Club)by Edwidge Danticat
Vintage; Published: 1998-01-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.88
Price in other shops: