Sea of Tears: A Novel

by Nani Power

Book Overview

This is all about love, begins The Sea of Tears, a story that is infused with the sensuality and smarts that have established Nani Power as one of our most compelling writers. This otherworldly novel... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1582433038
• Release Date: December 2004
• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.09 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.8" x 1.0" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Tears of Happiness!

This is a great book, Nani Power's best one yet. If you liked Crawling at Night, you'll love this one!! Buy it now!

Nani Power Pushes the Narrative Envelope

In her third and latest novel, The Sea of Tears, Nani Power pushes the narrative envelope while also taking some impressive risks in language and form, particularly in her use of metafictional techniques. The characters, Americans, lost or living marginal lives, and recent Iraqi and Iranian immigrants, also struggling to survive in and understand an often baffling American way of life, are vivid, fascinating and truly authentic. Power takes the reader into cultures that, due to the prejudices of xenophobia, have come to be seen as "other," when they are really part of the extraordinary diversity of the human condition. She invites us to welcome the food, the languages, the consciousness and sensibility of the Middle East instead of writing off refugees from those little understood countries and cultures as potential "terrorists;" and Power addresses that failure with great irony in her story of Jedra, the hotel's Iraqi boiler room "engineer" and the building's disaster, which he foresees and tries to communicate to its management with tragi-comic consequences. The American characters, from Phyllis and Patricia to the amazing Bostich, are beautifully portrayed, while the venerable Hotel Royale in Washington, D.C. where the action of the novel is mostly set, like the restaurant in Power's first book, Crawling at Night, and the hospital in her second, The Good Remains, becomes a powerful setting for the novel and metaphor for the society around it, as well as a tense narrative pressure cooker. I also admired the way she weaves the poetry of Rumi, the 13th century Persian mystic, which appears as epigraphs and chapter headings, into the narrative and the characters' thoughts, so that they and the themes the poems underscore become inseparable. A Sea of Tears is an extraordinary novel, worthy of serious literary consideration and reading for the pure enjoyment of the story and Power's fine prose.