Dec 24, 2009

The Farming of Bones | Style

Pace
Danticat's story begins slowly, told with a languid, measured pace, set in a traditional agrarian society, and the first scene, after a dreamlike encounter between Amabelle and her lover Sebastien, involves the birth of twins, a boy and a girl, to her wealthy employer. At first, the book seems very much like many weighty classics of nineteenth-century literature, which begin with the birth of the protagonist.

Danticat turns this expectation upside down, however: the real hero of the story is not either of the children, but Amabelle, the servant, who...