The Farming of Bones.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Review - Brief Article

This year, I failed to conserve much time for the rambles of fiction and poetry. But one novel I highly recommend is Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones (Soho Press, 1998). Set in the Dominican Republic in 1937 during the regime of General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the book is told through the voice of Amabelle, a Haitian servant who falls in love with a Haitian sugarcane worker on the plantation.

Danticat's writing is lush. "I can smell his sweat, which is as thick as sugarcane juice when he's worked too much," Amabelle narrates. "I can still feel his lips, the eggplant-violet gums that taste of greasy goat milk boiled to candied sweetness with mustard-colored potatoes."

This is a doomed love story, dashed upon the shoals of dictatorship. Danticat has Amabelle recount Trujillo's massacre of more than 12,000 Haitians that year, a massacre that her lover did not survive and that she only barely does.

Amabelle's harrowing account of her escape and the stories of other survivors mark the second half of the novel. Amid the horror, Danticat inserts evidence of how people cling to the life raft of memory.

Amabelle meets a man who "had been struck with a machete on the shoulder and left for dead. When he awoke the next morning, he found himself in a pit surrounded...