Edwidge Danticat Wrestles With Death, in Life and in Art

This book is a kind of prayer for her mother — an act of mourning and remembrance, a purposeful act of grieving. It’s also a book about how Danticat and other writers have tried to come to terms with the fact of death.

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She writes about Tolstoy writing in “Confession” about the deaths of loved ones and strangers, and the rumor that he was so determined to share his own last moments that he “came up with a series of codes, including eye movements, so that when his time came, he could describe to the people around him what it was like to die.” She writes about “Mortality,” Christopher Hitchens’s brave, funny, shattering account of his 18-month fight with esophageal cancer and his steadfast determination not to feel sorry for himself. And she writes about Gabriel García Márquez’s fear of dying, and how, in “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” he wrote about “death as though it were the only possible subject.”

Characters in García Márquez’s novel, she points out, “die alone, en masse, in wars, massacres, executions, drownings, suicides. They die from miscarriages and during childbirth, from old age — very old age — and disease and, every now and then, of natural causes. Some spend months and years dying and get sprawling death scenes. Others are simply done with in a sentence or two or in a few words.”

Like John Updike, Danticat writes beautifully about fellow writers, dissecting their magic and technique with a reader’s passion and a craftsman’s appraising eye. There are illuminating passages in this volume about the role that suicide and murder play in Toni Morrison’s fictional world, where “death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person,” at least not as bad as “the living death that was slavery.” And a moving section about the solace Danticat took — in the wake of the Haiti earthquake of 2010, which claimed members of her own family — in rereading “After the Quake,” Haruki Murakami’s collection of stories set after the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan.

At times, Danticat’s references to books by other writers — including Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor,” Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Mary Gordon’s “Circling My Mother” — proliferate so rapidly that the reader can feel like a student cramming for finals in a seminar on the Literature of Death and Grief. We are given an aside about the obsession with suicide shared by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton; an analysis of why Alice Sebold had the 14-year-old narrator of “The Lovely Bones” recount the story of her own rape and murder; and disquisitions on how novelists like Camus, Thornton Wilder and Don DeLillo have depicted death.

Such passages obviously lack the intimacy of the sections of this book devoted to Danticat’s mother, but the reader gradually comes to understand why the author is circling around and around an almost unbearable loss: As a grieving daughter, she wants to understand how others have grappled with this essential fact of human existence; and as a writer — a “sentence-maker,” in the words of a DeLillo character — she wants to learn how to use language to try to express the inexpressible, to use her art to mourn.

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