Read Yes
Length 288
Quick Review A novel about the desire to understand people and situations. The desire is rarely satisfied, but you don’t have to understand to connect and care.
The Caregiver by Samuel Park was published posthumously. He passed away from stomach cancer at the age of 41. It is hard to read this novel without seeing it as being written out of a place of hope and sadness.
Mara Alencar is a young woman living in the United States sans documents after a childhood watching atrocities in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She is the caretaker to a woman dying from cancer. She reminisces about her childhood home and her mother, Ana. Mara is both caretaker and child to her mother. Like most children there is a duality to her. She understands more than the adults around her realize, but she also is only able to accept the world as it appears to her without perceiving the nuance, complexity, and difficulty that is being human.
The writing style is very beautiful. Park allows Mara to witness situations as a child she cannot understand, but the reader, with adult experiences, sees what she cannot. Lacing the present with the past, brings a fullness to Mara’s adulthood that would otherwise result in a flat character. Park uses lexical foreshadowing to create emotional space between characters without giving away any events to come. The use of Portuguese words brings the reader closer to Mara’s cultural heritage.
Park captures the experience of trying to understand a situation from the outside. There is a yearning for understanding in Mara, which comes to fruition through her connecting with those around her.
