Summary Of A Place Where The Sea Remembers By Sandra Benitez

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Sandra Benitez was born in Washington D.C. on March 26, 1941. Her birth name is Sandy Ables, she had lived her childhood in Mexico and El Salvador where her father served as a diplomat. When Benitez was a teenager she was sent to live with her grandparents up north where she had become “Americanized”. In 1979 she had left her job and had began to attend a creative writing course. “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”. (Benitez, Sandra Benitez) This had led her to change her name to Sandra Benitez and focus on writing on her Latina heritage. In 1993 Benitez had published her first novel, A Place Where the Sea Remembers, receiving the Minnesota Book Award and the Barnes and Noble Discover Award. A Place Where the Sea Remembers is set it 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. The characters struggle to survive and conquer in the hard and strange world, one ends by the rhythms and the power of the sea. This novella is set in a world filled with love and betrayal and hope and despair. 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 novella. The characters create a natural picture of life that is both a universal portrait and an inside look at the life in Latin America. In A Place Where the Sea Remembers, is filled with guilt and regret, the main factors in the characters lives, and forgiving one other is hard to come by. Some of the characters experience the pain of trying to live wi... ... middle of paper ... ...a cycle. They believe that birth isn’t necessarily the beginning and that death is definitely not the end. In fact, they believe that in order to start a life one has to die. This is similar to Chayo and Marta. Marta and Chayo are not on speaking terms for several years. Chayo is mad at her sister because went to the El Brujo to have her sisters unborn child dead. After many years of avoiding each other, Chayo finally gives forgives her sister and welcomes her back into her life. “For Marta, Richard’s death was not an end, but instead the new beginning to her life with her sister. Through death, new life began.” While there are many themes that can be found in this novella, Benitez skillfully uses the Mexican culture and the beliefs to improve her story, giving it understanding beyond the traditional American thoughts that many foreign writers are unable to achieve.

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