The Weight of All Things: A Novel

by Sandra Benitez

Overview

"Bentez's third novel seamlessly blends fact with imagination, evoking the trauma of war more vividly than any newspaper account . . . beautifully illuminating." (Publishers Weekly starred review)

Sandra Bentez received international acclaim for her first two novels: A Place Where the Sea Remembers ("A quietly stunning work that leaves soft tracks in the heart" —Washington Post Book World) and Bitter Grounds ("The kind of book that fills your dreams for weeks" —Isabel Allende). Now she returns with an unforgettable tale of life in war-torn El Salvador.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786887033
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	02/20/2002
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	239
Product dimensions:	5.19(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Sandra Benítez is the author of A Place Where the Sea Remembers, which won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. She is also the author of Bitter Grounds, which won the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award, and The Weight of All Things, which was a Book Sense 76 selection. Benítez is a past Keller-Edelstein Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Minnesota, and recently won a Bush Foundation Fellowship in Fiction. She lives in Minnesota.

Editorial Reviews

In this graceful and unabashedly tender hearted novel, the politics behind the fighting is almost beside the point.

New York Times

Sandra Benitez's new novel, The Weight of All Things, ably conveys that intimate texture and an authentic sense of the personal experience of living through war . . . the sheer amount of historical and cultural detail, as well as the pointed and precise descriptive work, are wonderfully rewarding . . . And Benitez can move easily and fluidly from a graphic description of a field amputation to a sensual tribute to the joy of eating a tangerine.

Chicago Tribune

Benitez spins a lyrically heart-rending tale of a 9 year-old-boy's confrontation with . . . the Salvadoran civil war . . .

Washington Post

The Weight of All Things, like Kosinski's The Painted Bird, illuminates . . . more than any report of events in El Salvador I have ever read . . . will stay with me.

Katharine Weber

A graceful and unabashedly tenderhearted novel.

New York Times Book Review

Benítez does it again. From the first lyrical sentence . . . world of violence, love, death, and redemption. What a read!

Ana Veciana Suarez

Benitez, author of A Place Where the Sea Remembers and Bitter Grounds, finds inspiration for her third novel, which concerns a nine-year-old boy named Nicolas, in two events that occurred in El Salvador in 1980. The first is the gathering of more than 80,000 people at the Metropolitan Cathedral for the funeral of the assassinated Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, which ended in the death of 35 people and the wounding of 450 more. The second, which occurred two months later, is the massacre by Honduran and Salvadoran troops of 600 people fleeing rural repression. The author effectively uses these two tragedies to tell the story of Nicolas' search for his mother, who, unbeknownst to him, was killed instantly while protecting him from the chaos that ensued at the archbishop's funeral. Nicolas' efforts take him on a harrowing journey through the war-torn landscape of El Salvador. Nicolas must live through the random and violent deaths of friends and family, the destruction of local communities and the constant fear of machine-gun fire. While on one level the book traces the brave Nicolas' tragically premature coming-of-age, the novel also delivers, with straightforward and evocative prose, a deeply affecting and startling portrait of a country ravaged by warring factions, and the innocent people caught, quite literally, in the crossfire. It may be worth noting that a portion of the proceeds from this book will go to Rosie O'Donnell's For All Kids Foundation, which grants money to nonprofit organizations that support the intellectual, social and cultural development of disadvantaged children across the United States.
—Mimi O'Connor

A nine-year-old boy wanders through war-torn El Salvador, trying to find his mother and stay out of the line of fire, in this lucid but limited tale. Benítez (Bitter Grounds, 1997, etc.) sets her third novel in the six-week period between two recent cataclysms of Salvadoran history: the March 1980 funeral of assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero, at which 35 mourners were killed; and the military's massacre of 600 fleeing peasants on the Honduran border. Although her protagonist, Nicolás de la Virgen Veras, lives in the countryside with his grandfather, he goes to San Salvador to join his mother at"the funeral of a martyred saint." When violence breaks out at the cathedral, Nicolás's mother is killed by a bullet. Separated from her body by chaotic circumstances, the boy thinks she's still alive, but he doesn't have the address of the house where she was a servant. So he journeys back to his rural village, only to find it abandoned and devastated by bombings. As he roams about, Nicolás meets both leftist guerrillas and right-wing army soldiers—all of whom say exactly what you'd expect—and comes to understand the tragedy of being caught in the middle. As Benítez notes,"While the two sides fought for their principles, most of the dying was done by the people." Contrasting with the novel's usual plainspoken realism are the occasional manifestations of the Virgin Mary, who gives guidance and reassurance to Nicolás during his most harrowing moments. Such scenes—when, for example, a statuette of the Virgin actually speaks to the little boy—are authentically weird and sometimes a bit mawkish. Buttheydon't distract fromBenítez's vivid portrait of a time and place in which even children are murdered without second thought. Quite a valuable history lesson, despite its stock types. Author tour

Kirkus Reviews