Edwige Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light, which began as a short story in the 2010 anthology Haiti Noir, succeeds magnificently as a novel, a love letter to Haiti and an exceptionally clear-eyed look at its sorrows and failures. It builds on themes and structure from previous works such as Krik? Krak! but feels fresh and vivid.
At the novel's heart is Claire Limyè Lanmè, a child raised by her father, Nozias, an illiterate fisherman, after her mother died in childbirth. It is the morning of Claire's seventh birthday. Nozias has often wondered whether he should give Claire away, unable to imagine providing a future for her. He has asked Gaelle Cadet Lavaud, who had been kind to his wife and who has lost her own husband and daughter, to take the child. Gaelle has refused in the past; today, as the village men comb the beach in search of a fisherman lost at sea, she agrees, but then Claire disappears.
The novel unspools from here, going back through each of Claire's previous birthdays to tell the story of someone who died that day and who they left behind, however close or unsubstantial their connection to Claire and Nozias. Characters on the periphery of one story take center stage later with a story of their own, where Claire briefly appears. In this indirect, looping and overlapping way, we piece together what happened both over the course of a single day and through the years. Danticat shows how the past infuses the present, how lives overlap, unknowable but essential. This is a stunning, complex and compassionate novel, and ultimately a hopeful one. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer