Bitter Grounds
Sandra Benitez, 1997
Macmillan Picador
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312195410
Summary
Winner, 1998 American Book Award
In 1932 El Salvador, Elena de Contreras and her husband Ernesto live the luxurious life of the very wealthy: regular trips to Europe and the United States, vast amounts of property, several gorgeous homes. In sharp contrast to their privileged existence, however, are the lives of the coffee workers they employ, who know only the hardships of back-breaking labor and low wages.
Mercedes Prieto, a Pipil Indian, comes from such a back-ground. After losing her son and husband in the aftermath of a violent uprising against rich plantation owners, she flees with her daughter Jacinta to work in the household of Elena de Contreras. Their arrival sets in motion a spellbinding story that takes three generations to unfold, as the two families become inexorably intertwined and their private turmoil mirrors the upheaval of the world around them.
Rich in history, tradition, color, and drama, Bitter Grounds is at once poetic and unsentimental, a page-turning saga that satisfies and entertains to the very last drop. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1941
• Where—Washington, DC, USA
• Reared—in Mexico and El Salvador
• Education—B.A., M.A., Northeast Missouri State Univ. (USA)
• Awards—American Book Award
• Currently—lives in Edina, Minnesota, USA
Sandra Benitez was born in Washington, D.C., and spent her childhood and early adulthood in Mexico and El Salvador. She then moved to the United States and received both an under-graduate and master's degree from Northeast Missouri State University.
She published her first novel, A Place Where the Sea Remembers, when she was 52. She lives with her husband in Edina, Minnesota. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Packs an emotional punch.... A compelling read.
Boston Globe
Grabs us at the most visceral level.... Benitez's clear writing and considerable imagination enable her to make the political personal, luminous, and even comic.
Ms Magazine
Centering on a letter that remains unopened for 26 years, Benitez's impressive saga follows the intertwined lives of three generations of Salvadoran women, the very rich and the very poor, friends and mothers and daughters, mistresses and servants and, finally, oppressors and victims and guerrillas. Their lives are played out against the backdrop of the ever-present radio soap-opera serial and the violence and corruption of the police state and civil war of 20th-century El Salvador. Benitez's prose is rich and fluid; one tastes and smells the world of Jacinta and Magda and their mothers and daughters. Like her first novel (A Place Where the Sea Remembers), this work is another welcome addition to the growing body of Latina literature. —Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, Ore.
Library Journal
A luminously rendered second novel from the author of A Place Where the Sea Remembers (1993). Here, memorable pairs of mothers and daughters, caught up in the violence of recent Salvadoran history, live, love, and die for their passions. Ben¡tez excels at capturing the textures of landscape, of class and period, and tells here a multigenera-tional saga shaped by politics but refreshingly free of polemic. Her upper-class characters are as fairly delineated as her peasants, as she tells the story of three generations of mothers and daughters whose lives intersect. She begins with the infamous massacre of 1932, when Indian peasants suspected of being communists were slaughtered in the countryside. Thirteen-year-old Jacinta and her mother, Mercedes Prieto, are the only survivors of the attack in which their home is burned and Mercedes's husband killed. The two struggle to survive. When Mercedes begins working for wealthy landowners Elena and Ernesto de Contreras, however, life improves. Elena, a more enlightened product of her class and times, has her own sadness: On the eve of daughter Magda's wedding, she discovers Cecilia, her best friend, in bed with Ernesto. Hurt and angry, she vows never to see Cecilia again, which of course has repercussions in a story that suffers from foreshadowing. As the country experiences coups and falling coffee prices, the women try to live normal lives but find it impossible. Jacinta's first love is killed for being a union supporter; Alma, her daughter by a married man, becomes a revolutionary and dies in a botched kidnapping; and Magda, who employs Jacinta and raises daughter Flor, along with Alma, loses her husband and son-in-law in the same kidnapping. Exile in Miami with a hint of a happy ending as the war heats up in the late '70s is the only option for Jacinta, Magda, and her family. A sometimes schematic but always vivid chronicle of strong women facing the challenges of living in sad and violent times.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How do the generations change, in their attitudes, beliefs, aspirations? Consider the world events surrounding these characters during the span of the novel, from 1932 to 1977: How are outside forces (economic depression, war, worker rebellion, civil unrest) reflected in their daily lives?
2. What is the significance of "Los Dos," the daily radio soap opera—both its content and the rituals of its audience?
3. Coffee provides a way of life in El Salvador. What is its role in the lives of these characters, symbolically and literally?
4. Discuss examples of magic realism and their role in the story: do you think the departure from reality adds to or detracts from your belief in these events? Why do you think the author chose to include them? Other writers (Laura Esquivel, Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to name a few) have also used this effect; if you've read their work, compare it to Bitter Grounds, or discuss if or why Latin American writing lends itself to magic realism. Do any North American writers try their hands at it?
5. Discuss some of the characters whose lives take dramatic and irreversible turns.
6. Bitter Grounds depicts the sharp differences between the lives of the rich and the poor. But the two classes also shared much in common. In what ways were they alike?
7. The poor turned to the left for help politically, the rich turned to the right, and this polarization eventually led to a tragic civil war. Who do you think is to blame for the failure to find a middle ground?
8. Women writing about women are sometimes accused of doing so at the expense of their male characters. Discuss the role of men in this novel and how you feel they are portrayed.
9. What did you find interesting about mother/daughter rela-tionships in Latin America? And how do these differ, if at all, from the way things work in our country?
10. In the final analysis, who were the winners and who were the losers in Bitter Grounds?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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