Carry Me Like Water

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

On Sale: 09/06/2005

Carry Me Like Water

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

On Sale: 09/06/2005

Format:

About the Book

"Sentimental and ferocious, upsetting and tender, firmly magic-realist yet utterly modern. . . Sáenz is a writer with greatness in him." —San Diego Union Tribune

With Carry Me Like Water, Benjamin Alire Sáenz unfolds a beautiful story about hope and forgiveness, unexpected reunions, an expanded definition of family, and, ultimately, what happens when the disparate worlds of pain and privilege collide.

Diego, a deaf-mute, is barely surviving on the border in El Paso, Texas. Diego's sister, Helen, who lives with her husband in the posh suburbs of San Francisco, long ago abandoned both her brother and her El Paso roots. Helen's best friend, Lizzie, a nurse in an AIDS ward, begins to uncover her own buried past after a mystical encounter with a patient.

This immensely moving novel confronts divisions of race, gender, and class, fusing together the stories of people who come to recognize one another from former lives they didn't know existed— or that they tried to forget. 

Critical Praise

“A powerful and poetic novel.... Demonstrates a perceptive novelist’s knowledge of those deeper, interior rhythms that somehow propel us, at times in beauty and at times in tortured patterns, across the surface of the earth.” — Albuquerque Journal

“Saenz is wonderful, at times magnificent.” — Baltimore Sun

Carry me Like Water is indeed a lovely first novel, rich in its sense of place and people. Benjamin Alire Saenz has a fine talent.” — Larry McMurtry, author of Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo

Carry Me Like Water is full of love, loathing and a cacophony of characters which people the spiritual airwaves from El Paso to California. Certainly a new perspective in the Chicano novel.” — Rudolfo Anaya, author of Bless Me Ultima

“Benjamin Saenz has created with his first novel a work of unique and endearing quality. The characters and conflicts appear as in no other book I’ve read. There is a well-wrought and compelling ferment of pain and pathos, the familiar with the supernatural, the poetic with plot.” — Luis Rodriguez, author of Always Running: Gang Days in L.A.

“In a voice profoundly androgynous, radically compassionate, and equally at home in two languages, Saenz moves from the inner lives of women to those of men, from rich to poor, Chicano to gringo, believer to skeptic, building symmetries and counterpoints that maintain their delicacy even in the midst of emotional explosion. That the words ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ could believably incarnate in the tough, two-facer city of el Paso-Juarez did not seem possible to me. Until this book.” — David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and The Rivers Y

“Benjamin Saenz knows well the desert world of El Paso, Texas, that searing landscape of little rain. In his novel, Carry Me Like Water, the broken-spirited run from and yet desperately seek family, the greater connection to all human life. To belong to someone. Something greater than oneself. Rain-soaked roots. Life. This is a novel that is harsh yet merciful. Unforgettable as land." — Denise Chavez, author of Face of an Angel

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Resources

Product Details

  • ISBN: 9780060831332
  • ISBN 10: 0060831332
  • Imprint: Harper Perennial
  • On Sale: 09/06/2005
  • Pages: 512
  • List Price:19.99 CAD
  • BISAC1 : FICTION / Historical
  • BISAC2 : FICTION / Friendship
  • BISAC3 : FICTION / Fantasy / Romantic
  • BISAC4 : FICTION / Fantasy / Historical
  • BISAC5 : FICTION / Fantasy / Contemporary
  • BISAC6 : FICTION / Disabilities & Special Needs
  • BISAC7 : DRAMA / American / General
  • BISAC8 : FICTION / Literary
  • BISAC9 : FICTION / Hispanic & Latino
  • BISAC10 : FICTION / Family Life / Siblings

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