Customer Reviews

A Feather on the Breath of God: A Novel

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3 star:		(7)
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The speaker in Nunez's touching novel struggles with issues concerning her cultural identity, her relationships with her parents, and her relationships with men. She constantly deals with how her genes, her parent's cultures, and her upbringing in America have come together to form a cultural identity. As the daughter of a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother, the speaker grows up with two distinct cultural influences. She finds herself pulled in different directions, unsure of what aspect of her should define her cultural identity more, or if it is possible to find a balance between them all. The speaker also reexamines her relationship with her parents and her obsession with ballet through nostalgic memories and insight. Through her writing, the speaker comes to terms with her parents' unhappy marriage as well as the notion that her love of ballet stemmed from a desire for perfection and escape from her dysfunctional family. The reader will find that Nunez spins a memorable story that thoroughly engages the reader, and is a must read for anyone interested in issues concerning immigration, multiculturalism, coming of age in a culture that rewards beauty and thinness, identity, and international relationships.

There were many reasons I felt I had to read this book (my interest in writers even vaguely Latin American being one of them) and I am glad that I did.

My favorite part was definitely "Immigrant Love," the last section of the book, where the narrator has an affair with a Russian immigrant. "He has no curiosity at all about me. After all, I am only a woman; facts about me can't be very important." One of the most honest portrayals of the complexities of human relationships that I have ever read. As a dancer, I found "A Feather on the Breath of God," the third section, interesting and surprisingly foreign to my own experience, but none the less enriching to read. The novel's spare structure makes you feel the necessity of every word on the page.

The protagonist writes from the perspective of a childhood bound by the separate histories of her parents: a Panamanian-Chinese father who is sixteen years older than her German mother when they meet on V-E Day in Germany, later moving to America with few financial resources. Two daughters later, they marry and the third daughter, the narrator, is born. After the workaholic father's premature death, the German-born Christa becomes the focus of the next part of the story. Christa is an enigma, a beautiful woman who spurns the interests of men and the friendships of women, proud of her English skills, albeit with the occasional slip of the tongue ("They stood in a motel for a week"). This cross-cultural family remains essentially unassimilated, moving from project to project in New York. Plagued by periods of rage and depression, Christa's home holds no warmth, the daughter stepping lightly through her mother's moods.

Drawn to the ballet at twelve, the girl adores the combined smells of sweat, rosin and Jean Nate: "Everything about the world of ballet responds to the young girl looking to escape real life." And for a time, this is heaven. The authoritarianism is familiar, but in ballet it has purpose, a means of transcending the small world of the projects. Ballet celebrates the female, is dominated by her ability to enact precise turns and intricate moves. Of course, the almost boyish figure of a ballerina activates a horror of pounds, eating disorders feeding on the paranoia of weight gain: "In dance, pain was often inseparable from desirable feelings." Although the narrator doesn't claim an eating disorder, this flirtation with dance is but one more chapter in her life. Eventually, she is teaching an ESL class to immigrants and has an affair with a married Russian, Vadim. Her lover shoots up heroin, but that is preferable to the violence incurred when he is drinking vodka. This phase is short-lived, if unexplained, the protagonist headed toward the next chapter.

There is no beginning, middle and ending to this fiction, merely a sequence of events. Nunez is what I call a patchwork writer, relying on anecdotes to move her tale along, but without a passionate commitment. Uses a cast of assorted immigrants to spin out stories, the author fills the years as the girl grows older, but she hides behind this ploy, her identity cleverly obscured by the characters. Nunez supplies the facts (and quotations), as well as the answers to endless rhetorical questions, but that bone deep honesty that allows me to love a writer's work is missing. How much more powerful would these immigrant tales be if Nunez allowed herself to truly inhabit these characters? Luan Gaines/ 2005.

You'll never want your daughter to take ballet! I gave this book to my brother-in-law (an avid reader and medical scholar) and he had to stop himself from calling me in the middle of the night (when he finished reading it) to tell me how much he liked it.

I absolutely loved this book. I thought it was imaginative, truthful and articulate. Everything a reader wish for in a novel. Never before have I connected with a novel like I did with this one. Her section, "A Feather on the Breath of God" was an especially captivating part. A good read for anyone: Male or Female. Young or Old. Asian or Not. You will truly not be able to put this book down!

Before I even began to engage with this text, I was drawn not only by the cover but captivated by the title because of its abstractness. What does a feather on the breath of God really mean? I kept getting conflicting mental images of fragility and power. Sigrid Nunez's novel is uniquely mesmerizing and had a firm hold of me throughout the entire read.

The beauty in this novel is crafted in the character development and is divided up neatly into four sections. The novel opens up with an unnamed female protagonist who begins by painting the story of her hauntingly sad father, Chang, a Chinese-Panamanian immigrant. The reader is immensely aware of the loss of connection that the protagonist experiences with her father and makes you question if his own unwillingness to assimilate is the direct cause of the type of relationship he has with his daughters. The next section is starkly juxtaposed with the story of her mother, Christa, a German immigrant. She is ruthlessly opinionated and is clearly the one ruling their home. Nunez sheds light on the parents' unpromising and ominous marriage and how that ends up playing an important role in the novel. The story fluidly flows incorporating the domineering, selfish and emasculating Christa and the passive, quiet and absent Chan. It illustrates how these two people help shape the teenage years of our unnamed protagonist and how this spills over into her own adult life when she impetuously marries a Russian immigrant. No matter where you are in the novel, Nunez has a way of playing with your emotions and making you sympathize with every character.

The last two sections are filled with love, lust, hope and heartache, but in a very satisfying way. The suspense of whether the protagonist's past will anchor her demise or will she be triumphant is subtly inserted throughout the novel by Nunez. Using the historical background of each character Nunez masterfully creates these poignant characters that not only become alive in this novel but she allows the reader to get lost in the complexity of their character and forces us to question whether fate is a result of our family's own shortcomings.

The novel takes starts off slow and takes a little bit of time to pick up steam, but I promise you the ride is well worth it. With this novel being part biographical, Nunez exposes a vulnerability expressing how the protagonist challenges and overcomes the sins of her family. I enjoyed being lost in the novel and was thoroughly satisfied by how everything came together in the end. A must read that you will have a difficult time putting down.

Love, hate, adultery, identity struggle, controlling mother, and distant father: these are just few of the many things that make this book what it is. However, this is the single most important thing that can be taken from this novel: how an individual is raised as a child can have a great impact on the kind of person he or she becomes as an adult.
An extensive novel about the diverse background of a girl with many different cultures, A Feather on the Breath of God explores the adolescence of an interracial girl and the struggle she goes through to be her own person. The novel is separated into descriptions of each of the girl's parents and herself. Her father is characterized as a reserved man with few words and actions, while her mother as a proud, German woman without a comforting bone in her body. The narrator is portrayed as a young girl with an identity crisis, not knowing whether to associate herself with her father's or mother's backgrounds and cultures. She falls in love with the art of ballet and focuses on this passion to distract herself from her unavoidable, dysfunctional family. The last section of the novel describes her as an adult, falling in love with a married Russian man and how she goes forth handling their flawed relationship.
Structured as a conglomeration of anecdotes rather than a single, continuing plotline, A Feather On the Breath of God unfortunately did not move me as much as I hoped it would. I can relate to the narrator because she has a strong, opinionated mother like I had, but I could not deeply connect with the novel on a personal level. Although, I found it extremely beautiful that the narrator realized her passion for ballet and admired her devotion and dedication to the art. I would not pick up this book for entertainment purposes; however, I understand that it is a novel of deep, profound meaning and I respect its literary prestige. Purchase this book if that is what you are looking for.

As a disgruntled, pretentious college student, I am particularly hard to please. A Feather on the Breath of God is no different. I have generally mixed feelings about the book. It is divided into four sections, each about a different facet of the main character's life, ranging from her childhood to her lovers. It begins with an introduction of her silent, diligent father Chang. She describes him as someone almost cultureless, "not like everybody else." The entire house was cluttered with objects connected to Germany, her mother's homeland. The book progresses to the protagonist's experiences with her mother Christa, which I'll talk about later. After the protagonist leaves the household, the narrator tells of her passion within dance and her experiences with fate. The last section talks about her relationship with Vadim, from Russia with love.

For their intended purpose, the chapters do quite well at bringing their point across. The narrator has a poor relationship with her Chinese father. Her mother is a crazy psychopath. The narrator loves to dance. That's all fine and dandy. What wasn't so compelling was the repetitiveness of the second chapter. I felt the nostalgia and love the mother expressed about Germany was one-dimensional. It did not need excessive description, nor did it require a disproportionate number of examples of said trait. The writing portrayed the mother in a very negative light by the way she dominates the household and seemingly doesn't contribute anything but her heartfelt anger about all things not German. The author does a good job writing a realistic portrayal of complex characters, where there is still a bit of ambiguity. Nonetheless, I felt like the second chapter did not work for me, mostly due to its repetitive nature.

The last chapter was a surprising find. There are few novels which I am deeply immersed into a story enough to keep turning the page. This last chapter was one of those moments. It does a good job combining themes from the last three chapters into the protagonist's interaction with Vadim, who has said, "We don't have sex, we only have children." He says this only to be sardonic, with unusual idiosyncrasies and beliefs, such as his translation of the golden rule: "Today I am unlucky. Tomorrow it is someone else's turn to be unlucky." I believe the people around you say more about you than anything else, and I believe Vadim's unique personality and peculiar wisdom spoke volumes about her character. The character accounts were splendid, and that's what made the last chapter worthwhile. Still, the rest of the novel was pretty dull, so if you can stomach it, you'll find a great story in the final section of the book.

Forgotten father, malicious mother, deranged daughter, and the ludicrous lover.

Whether or not there was much written about each character in the novel, the importance was how impactful it was to our protagonist, the "deranged daughter." She grows up in a housing project in New York, escaping her tattered, broken home physically and mentally by running towards her dreams of becoming a ballet dancer only to face failure. We run with her through those dreams, though, and face with her the realities of what we call "life." But is she even living anymore? Our heroin reflects on her relationships with those who were supposedly the most impactful in her life, her Chinese-Panamanian father and German mother, connecting her upbringing with a Russian immigrant she had grown to love.

Although Nunez could have easily expanded on the mysteries of our protagonist, she had chosen to refrain from getting into the specificities of feelings and reactions to traumatic incidents and situations encountered in her life. Furthermore, instead of storyline, we receive anecdotes which are more or less comprehended, because she is, after all, reflecting. These anecdotes are the pieces to a puzzle that gets put together at the end, a math equation of broken home + broken dreams = a woman who attempts to find something in someone even though she has no clue what she's searching for.

All in all, I can't say it was the most heartfelt novel nor did I sit there at the end saying to myself, "most amazing book ever!" But strangely enough, it left me stunned in realization that I have had, over the past twenty-one years of my life, a similar relationship with my own father as the heroin had with hers: silent and subtle. Because of this novel, I ended up in a two hour conversation with my father for the first time since I was a little girl, talking about God knows what. Perhaps the book possessed some sort of magical power filled with lines like "my father not as one who would not speak but as one to whom no one would listen" that pushed me to save the relationship I still have before it was too late. Simply put, that small portion of the novel moved me enough to make movement.

Perhaps the book as a whole isn't quite the attraction, but what Nunez lacks in character development and a strong storyline, she makes up in crafty language.

Sigrid Nunez's A Feather on the Breath of God tries too hard to be a memoir. Although every detail in the book, from the story to the feelings right down to the synopsis on the back cover makes the book seem like the personal confessions of the author, I was disheartened to find out it was not. The beginning chapters of the novel, which should be better described as a work of fiction, is quite plausible, with the narrator reflecting on her own past and the patchy relationship between her and her parents. I was expecting a continuation of true events from the first three chapters, but I had mixed feelings about the conclusion, where the events the narrator experienced suddenly took a surreal turn. Overall, it seemed as if the book suffered from an identity problem: although it was trying to recount an experience about identity (which is a major theme in Asian American literature) the story was in the most important places dramatized to an almost uncertain extent. Instead of enhancing the novel, it took away the believability of it, leaving a work with much more to be desired.
The parts I felt were quite commendable were the first three chapters, divided between the narrator's experiences with her father, her mother, and later in life when she was training for the ballet. Conveniently, each chapter was titled with the name of the parent, except for the titular ballet chapter, which definitely adds a sense of muted artistic creativity to the book. These chapters, although slow, sets the foundation to understanding the narrator's actions in the rest of the book, especially the final chapter. Her relationship with her parents is accurately described, both in terms of evidence and tone. For example, the reader can deduce that her relationship with her father is cold and isolated from both what she described him as and how she described him. The narrator often revisits how he kept himself isolated, even from his children; "He had his own separate closet... he was small... he could be cruel." The combination of the cold description and how she described her father gives the reader a chance to feel what she was feeling. This unique way of joining the tone and empirical observations also occurs when she describe other characters.
Even though her style can definitely be lauded, it is her decision to make the rest of the story unreal that detracts from the overall enjoyment of the book. It might have been an effect of trying to market the book the book to attract more readers, but I would have much more preferred if her conflict was something more common and more plausible as her own experiences. The final chapter, which is the most entertaining and most provoking, follows the narrator's journey into the open world. She stays with a Russian couple, whose relationship mirrors her own parent's rocky relationship. She has this unconscious guilt of watching a sinking ship, knowing exactly how that relationship would end, but doesn't really try to fix it. Although the incompatibility of people is a common theme, it is the additional details which explains the Russian couple's apartness that make the final part quite implausible. I will spare mention of the graphic details, for the sake of the book, but I must mention that at least to me, it was quite shocking to read about those events and see how the narrator would not react in a way normal people, even normal strangers, would. Although the novel is quite artistically written, I would have to warn against this book as it did not fit my expectations.