Summary Of A Place Where The Sea Remembers By Sandra Benitez

Sandra Benitez, birth name Sandy Ables, was born in Washington D.C. March 26, 1941. Due to her father’s job as a diplomat, she lived most of her childhood in Mexico and El Salvador. During Benitez teenage years, she lived with her family in the United States where she assimilated into American culture. In 1979 she decided to leave her job and began to attend a creative writing class. “Her first novel, a murder mystery set in Missouri, was never published. She brought the novel to a writer’s conference, where she was told it was terrible”. (“About”, Benitez) This led her to become the person she is now and focus on writing of her Latina heritage. In 1993 Benitez had published her first novel, A Place Where the Sea Remembers, where she received the Minnesota Book Award and the Barnes and Noble Discover Award.

A Place Where the Sea Remembers is set in Santiago, Mexico and consists of short related stories, where each story is focused on a single character. The story portrays victory and disasters of the common people in South America. The characters struggle to survive and conquer in the hard and bizarre world. One of the characters life ends by the rhythms and power of the sea. This novel is set in a word that is filled with love, betrayal, despair and hope. It reveals stories as a bittersweet portrait of the people who live in Santiago, a village near the sea; the triumphs, hope, failures, and flaws of this novel. These characters provide an accurate representation of life in Latin America.

In A Place Where the Sea Remembers is filled with guilt and regret. Some of the characters experience the pain of trying to live with the disasters that has made an impact on their past. One of the characters makes a point that it is important...

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...ecome stronger when he finds out that his daughter, Justina, is no longer around. While he is drunk he mistakenly kills his bird, Rita, because it reminded him of the guilt build in. “Though tragic, this death too lends itself to rebirth.” With guilt off his shoulders he is finally to get on with the rest of his life. Regret have taken both of Esperanze and Rafael’s life. For Esperanze, she feels guilty for being raped and never telling anyone. For Rafael, he feels guilty for not being able to live his life because his mother is all he cares about. When the two come together, they are unable to forgive themselves and start their new lives together. For all of these characters, they all had to get over guilt or regret that has helped shaped the person they were. But being able to forgive one other is the only way for them to shape their life into something better.