These compelling essays mostly deal with writers’ fictional depictions of death, but the opening and closing sections bookending the collection-and many of the passages in between-read like a love letter to Danticat’s mother, who died of ovarian cancer in 2014. The roomful of writers assembled at the University of Oklahoma to select the prizewinner ultimately chose Danticat-who is best known for her fiction about the Haitian American experience-as this year’s laureate.
When Achy Obejas presented Edwidge Danticat as her candidate for the 2018 Neustadt International Prize for Literature last November, she spoke so glowingly about the essays included in The Art of Death that I was compelled to track it down. A moving tribute and a work of astute criticism, The Art of Death is a book that will profoundly alter all who encounter it.I t might seem odd to focus on a book called The Art of Death as spring approaches (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), but we all know about the ides of March, and as Eliot reminded us, April can be the cruellest month. The narrative, which continually circles the many incarnations of death from individual to large-scale catastrophes, culminates in a beautiful, heartrending prayer in the voice of Danticat's mother. "I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing." The book moves outward from the shock of her mother's diagnosis and sifts through Danticat's writing life and personal history, all the while shifting fluidly from examples that range from Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude to Toni Morrison's Sula. "Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses," Danticat notes in her introduction. A moving reflection on a subject that touches us all, by the bestselling author of Claire of the Sea LightĮdwidge Danticat's The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story is at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work.
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