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Review: Edwidge Danticat's 'Claire of the Sea Light' a moving story of love, death

 
Published Aug. 28, 2013

Edwidge Danticat's new novel is haunted by ghosts and grief, lifted by magic and love, all revolving around a 7-year-old girl.

Claire of the Sea Light is the name of both book and girl. In the child's native Creole, it's Claire Limyé Lanmé, a name given her by her mother, also called Claire, early in her pregnancy. She and her husband, fisherman Nozias Faustin, take his boat out to sea one night, and she surprises him by slipping into the water: "(H)e saw what she had swum out to observe. Surrounding her was a dazzling glow. It was as though her patch of sea were being lit from below. From her perfectly round breasts down, she was in the middle of a school of tiny silver fish. ..."

That magical moment is memorialized in a "name as buoyant as it sounded." But even in that moment, Nozias thinks of Lasirén, lovely goddess of the sea, "the last thing most fishermen saw before they died at sea, her arms the first thing they slipped into." For him and for all the novel's characters, love and death are inextricably entangled.

This is Danticat's fifth work of fiction for adult readers. (She's published four books for younger ones, as well as three nonfiction works). Like all of them since her acclaimed first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, this one is set in her native Haiti. She first came to the United States as a child and now lives in Miami, but her ties with that tragic and beautiful country remain strong.

Claire of the Sea Light opens on the girl's seventh birthday — a day that has always combined celebration with mourning, since her mother died giving birth to her. Her father adores her, but he struggles to make even the barest living, and going out to sea each day makes it tough to raise a child. So Nozias is in agonized negotiations, as he has been for several years, with one of the few well-off people in the town of Ville Rose to adopt Claire, allowing him to cheche lavi, leave in search of a better life.

It's a common pattern in perennially impoverished Haiti — Danticat's own parents left her and her brother with relatives when they were tots, going in search of good jobs and bringing their children to New York City to live only several years later.

Gaelle Lavaud, the fabric shop owner whom Nozias hopes will adopt his daughter, doesn't have those kinds of financial worries, but she bears other losses. Not only is she a widow, but her own beloved daughter died several years before — on Claire's fourth birthday. Gaelle has refused Nozias' offer before but keeps coming back to it, hoping the girl might fill the hole in her heart.

As she and the fisherman negotiate, little Claire suddenly figures out what they are proposing and runs away. As the search for her goes on, Danticat takes the reader deep into the town's past and the intricate, sometimes shocking connections among its people.

We learn the backstory of Claire's mother, who came from the country to Ville Rose and took a job working for the town's undertaker and mayor, Albert Vincent. She washes and dresses the dead, seeing it as not just a job but an act of respect and tenderness. Nozias jokes that "he was the only man she liked who wasn't dead," but theirs is a love match.

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Vincent's best friend, and another powerful man in Ville Rose, is Max Ardin Senior, who runs a school and conducts a rather busy romantic life. Then there is his son, Max Junior, who at 19 is just beginning to find himself. Max works at a local radio station with an idealistic young man named Bernard Dorien, who despite growing up in Cite Pendue, "a destitute and treacherous extension of Ville Rose," dreams of becoming a crusading journalist.

When the senior Ardin discovers his son has impregnated the family's maid, Max Junior is exiled to Miami, leaving behind "the only person he ever loved." Bernard's fate will be much worse.

Some of those past connections will be revealed on Claire's birthday, when Max Junior will return and meet his son for the first time — and that son's mother, Flore Voltaire, will sit for an interview on Di Mwen ("Tell Me") a confessional radio show conducted by Louise George, another person with power and secrets of her own.

Danticat paints each of her characters and their town with vivid detail and lyrical language. The book's plot unfolds not in a straight line but like the petals of a rose, stories one within another, each connected. Claire of the Sea Light is at times a heartbreaking book, but like the child whose name it bears, it is lit with its own inextinguishable glow.

Colette Bancroft can be reached at cbancroft@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8435.