Breath, Eyes, Memory

his is Danticat's remarkable first novel, a heavy tale of troubled women coming to terms with life's burdens and losses, inevitably passing the seeds of trauma and dysfunction down through the generations, with the best of intentions. Danticat's prose and style are beautiful, making it almost impossible to draw back from the heartache. There are a number of fine reviews on site, although those that criticize the structure, or speculate on how the story may not "work" for "middle class white readers" are pretty far off the mark. This is a human story, cultural details notwithstanding, that anyone with a beating heart should find moving. I'd love to sit a couple white male politicians down in a room with good lighting and not let 'em out show more 'til they've absorbed every last word. show less

Breath, Eyes, Memory was Edwidge Danticat's first novel which was published in 1994. I read it for my face2face book club and discussed it last night (over the delicious fish shown above). Of the seven of us, six really liked it and one found it to be a "soap opera". Count me among those who really liked it (4 1/2 stars worth).

The main character is Sophie, a Haitian girl who is being raised by her aunt while her mother is working in New York. At age 11, Sophie's mother sends for her and her life is changed abruptly. Although Sophie is the main character, the book also presents the story of her mother, her aunt and her grandmother. As the book jacket says, the book "evokes the wonder, terror and heartache of...Haiti -- and the enduring show more strength of Haiti's women". The main characters are well drawn, the story compelling and the writing beautiful. The only issue the six of us who liked it had with it is that there is one minor character, Louise, who is something of a mystery (why is she there? why does she behave as she does?) but it's a very minor flaw. Here are some samples of the writing:
"The men in this area, they insist that their women are virgins and have ten fingers. According to Tante Atie, each finger had a purpose. It was the way she had been taught to prepare herself to become a woman. Mothering. Boiling. Loving. Baking. Nursing. Frying. Healing. Washing. Ironing. Scrubbing. It wasn't her fault, she said. Her ten fingers had been named for her even before she was born. Sometimes, she even wished she had six fingers on each hand so she could have two left for herself."

"I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past likethe hair on your head. Where women return to their children ad butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to. My mother was as brave as stars at dawn. She too was from this place. My mother was like that woman who could never bleed and then could never stop bleeding, the one who gave in to her pain, to live as a butterfly. Yes my mother was like me." show less

There's a certain kind of reader that prefers novels about the interpersonal problems of couples who live in New York City or London. There's a certain kind of reader who likes books that contain characters that they can describe as "relatable." "Breath, Eyes, Memory" is not a book for those kind of readers. Like Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart", it's a novel that's filled with characters who love to tell stories but may never have picked up a novel in their lives. Split between rural Haiti and the grimy, dangerous parts of New York, there probably isn't much that middle-class native English speakers will be able to directly relate to here. During the scenes set in Haiti, its characters speak in a folk dialect so dense with metaphor show more and allusion that they might as well be reciting poetry to one another. The figurative language here is often extremely beautiful, but, as it seems awkawrdly translated from Creole or French, it often sits rather uncomfortably on the page, which is, I'd wager, exactly the effect the author sought to create. I liked it, but I imagine that some readers will find it too strange, others almost quaint. The scenes set in Reagan-era New York are, in contrast, enormously blunt about the pain and disorientation of the immigrant experience: the mental trauma that its characters feel is often so great that they often seem hardly able to fully acknowledge, never mind express, their confusion. While the parts of the book set in Haiti show how tight-knit Haitian families and rural communities can be, this human connection doesn't often seem to offer much comfort to anyone: the author is not at all interested in sparing the reader the details the place's overwhelming poverty. In "Breath, Eyes, Memory," life is, above all, hard and unforgiving, and involves one loss or disappointment after another.

Things do get better, though. The main character's family somehow manages to edge up into the American middle class. She meets a love interest so enormously likable that you wonder what he's doing in the novel at all, though her problems don't exactly disappear as soon as he makes his entrance. Her voice grows and matures as she does, and her and the reader's understanding of the books other characters also grows as the book moves forward, even as their pain lingers. But "Breath, Eyes, Memory" never quite stops seeming like an attempt -- if a fairly successful one -- to use the novelistic form to describe a sort of human experience that has, historically, been almost completely foreign to it. This, too, may or may not please its readers, and will probably lose some completely. Danticat, to her credit, doesn't seem much inclined to put any of her first world readers on familiar ground: "Breath, Eyes, Memory" feels like it's told on her terms.

Men are largely absent from the book, and there are times where it seems that the author is deliberately trying to portray life in this Haitian family as centered on communal, specifically female experience. There are times when the main character and her mother seem to strike a hard-fought balance between the culture that produced them and their later experiences. But it's never easy, and, as good as this novel can be, it's seldom a reassuring or comfortable read. It's an often poetic novel about the hard realities of survival in tough places. It's unlike most novels I've ever read, and won't be everybody's cup of tea. Even so, I'd recommend it to everyone but the readers mentioned at the beginning of my review. show less

Ellie (mirrordrum) had recommended I read Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat, after I'd enjoyed other Danticat books, and that was a good call. This apparently was her debut novel, set in Haiti and New York City.

"I come from a place where breath, eyes and memory are one, a place where you carry your past like the hair on your head,'' says our narrator Sophie Caco. The child of rape by an unknown father, she lives with her Tante Atie in a small town in Haiti while her mother sends back money to help them from NYC. The book revolves around family expectations and how to survive them intact, including that daughters remain virginal. Sophie, her mother and grandmother, and Tante Atie, all experience traumatic practices that have been show more passed down from generation to generation.

At 12 years old, Sophie joins her mother Martine in New York, and both try to reconcile and escape past tragedy. There is sadness in the story, but also beauty, including the bucolic life in Haiti and the struggles of immigrants to make it in New York. Sophie faces many challenges, and is relentlessly observant. Danticat has a graceful, hypnotic prose style, and this is one of her best. show less

An extraordinarily well written novel. There is so much going on in this novel, sometimes just beneath the surface—the crushing oppression of societal poverty, the richness of cultural tradition, the peril of cultural expectations, sexual violence, mental illness, immigration & assimilation, etc., etc. But Danticat tells the story with a sensitivity and subtlety that keeps the narrative itself always alive & compelling.

I picked this as my bookclub selection because I had so loved a collection of her short stories but this did not have quite the same magic. Perhaps because the issues it deals with are so very grim. It was still a powerful and moving story but hard to read and at some level hard to connect with. The women in the story, esp. Martine and Sophie, are so very damaged. At the core, it feels like a story of how women are as trapped by other women as by a deeply patriarchal society. Not easy topics to read about. Worth reading but hard to read.

Sophie Caco lives with her Tante Atie in Haiti, while her mother Martine is in New York. At the age of twelve, Sophie goes to New York to live with her mother and learns a dark secret that affects her relationship with her mother.

This is a harrowing book. While the Caco women - Sophie, Martine, Atie, and Ife (Sophie's grandmother) - are all strong, they all have heartbreak and hurt, and hurt each other. Sophie's first-person narration means you see the world through her eyes, and don't always realize the perspectives of the other characters until Sophie herself does. Danticat's writing is poetic and evocative. It's a well-crafted story that I would have enjoyed writing about as an English major, but it's so heartrending that I couldn't show more enjoy it. show less