Friday, February 22, 2019

Why are the narrator and her father going to Florida in The Book of the Dead?

In The Book of the Dead, Annie and her father are going to Florida from Brooklyn because she's a sculptor who wants to personally deliver her sculpture to a client. It's the first one she has ever sold.
Unfortunately, her father and the sculpture are gone when she wakes up in the motel they stayed in the night before delivering the statue. She promises the client that she'll have it for them the next day and doesn't tell them that "Father"—the name of the statue—has disappeared with her own father.
In the end, the sculpture is destroyed by her father and she finds out more about his history that she didn't know before. His past is entwined in certain ways with the Haitian dissident whose daughter wants the sculpture so much. She and her father love the hands on the sculpture that Annie made.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/06/21/the-book-of-the-dead-2


Annie is a sculptor. She's travelling with her father to Florida to deliver a statue she's recently made called "Father." The statue has been sold to a TV actress, the daughter of a Haitian dissident who is a refugee from torture and political repression in his homeland. The relatively close proximity of Florida to Haiti makes it a natural destination for Haitian immigrants and refugees. Annie's father is also a Haitian refugee; but it turns out that there's so much about him that she never knew. When she wakes up in a Florida motel room, she's surprised to discover that her father's vanished, and with him the sculpture; both father and "Father" are gone. By the time Annie discovers their whereabouts, her feelings toward her father have changed forever.

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