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A review by smark1342
The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat
Great book that took me forever to finish through no fault of it's own, just got to it during a month when I had no energy/time to read. One of the things I remember most viscerally from the black Jacobins was how fuckin hard cane cutting is and the first third of this book was fascinating in how little that seemed to have changed in the 130 years (and across the border) between the two books. Drawing a border that splits that island seems like such a futile artificial thing in so many ways and obviously has just hideous consequences all the way down. I feel like it also loads so many things with powerful symbolic meaning that must trickle down to the writing. The border and violence associated with it and the weird selective membrane felt like a bolano theme approached from a totally different angle.
Historical fiction sometimes feels off to me because you have to (or maybe feel you have to) provide context for the reader usually in corny clunky or ways and I admired how she largely avoided that. Taking a historical event like the parsley massacre, which I had always thought of as an event rather than as something that was more extensive in time and place, and making the reader feel like they understand something more about it from a bird's eye even though the writing is all very ground level is an incredible trick. It added so much reality to something that I obviously knew *existed* but existed in a more Wikipedia sense.
Amabelle is an interesting narrator in that she gives the other characters very little in the way of what she's thinking and then confides everything in the reader, sometimes in these abrupt almost surreal transitions away from the realist plot driven paragraphs preceding it.
Historical fiction sometimes feels off to me because you have to (or maybe feel you have to) provide context for the reader usually in corny clunky or ways and I admired how she largely avoided that. Taking a historical event like the parsley massacre, which I had always thought of as an event rather than as something that was more extensive in time and place, and making the reader feel like they understand something more about it from a bird's eye even though the writing is all very ground level is an incredible trick. It added so much reality to something that I obviously knew *existed* but existed in a more Wikipedia sense.
Amabelle is an interesting narrator in that she gives the other characters very little in the way of what she's thinking and then confides everything in the reader, sometimes in these abrupt almost surreal transitions away from the realist plot driven paragraphs preceding it.