By the Light of My Fathers Smile [Paperback]

Alice Walker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1999

'All your life you have the necessary illusion that you know all there is to know about heartbreak. I hate to the one to tell you about the heartbreak you will experience after you die...' A family goes to the remote sierras of Mexico - the writer-to--be Susannah; her sister Magdalena; their father and mother. There, amid indigenous people called the Mundo, they begin an encounter that will change them more than they ever could have dreamed. This is a deeply sensual novel that explores the richness of female sexuality as a celebration of life, affirming the belief 'that it is the triumphant heart, not the conquered heart, that forgives. And that love is both timeless and beyond'.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Mundo are a new tribe, created by the intermingling of escaped Black slaves and native Indians in the Mexican Sierras. Ineligible for academic funding, a husband-and-wife team of African American anthropologists pose as Christian missionaries to secure sponsorship to live among the Mundo and study their culture. This soul-stifling deception underlies the family tragedy at the heart of Alice Walker's novel, her first in six years. The father, preaching the message of his puritanical Protestant sponsors, is "sucked into the black cloth" of Christianity and blinded to the Mundo's life-affirming ways. When he discovers his daughter Magdalena's affair with a young Mundo, he beats her with a belt, thus estranging himself from both her and the younger daughter, Susannah. The first of several narrative voices to speak is his. Dead, he has become an "angel" who observes his daughters from the "other side" and seeks to make amends for the pain he inflicted on them in life.

It is the conceit of By the Light of My Father's Smile that angels have complete access to the consciousness of the living beings they observe. One of the book's very first scenes involves the ebullient lovemaking of Susannah and her partner, Pauline, reported in sweaty detail by the angelic paternal voyeur. Highly explicit, this set piece is a kind of guerrilla assault on our sensibilities, preparing us to receive Walker's urgent message--that sexuality and spirituality are inextricable, that denying one causes the other to atrophy as well. The blessings of fathers are, according to this canon, essential to the sexual flowering and spiritual maturity of their female offspring. It is in the loss, the conferring, and the claiming of these blessings that the novel finds its narrative thrust.

By the Light of My Father's Smile is intended perhaps less as a story than as a parable presenting Walker's cosmology for the new millennium--one that synthesizes ancient and modern wisdoms in a way that's as artistically daring as it is politically correct: Sex is good, repression is evil. Dominant is bad, distaff is good. European culture is dead meat, the third world is wise, there is ongoing commerce between the living and the dead, great orgasms shall set us free. Many readers will agree that a world built upon these precepts surely would be preferable to the one we now inhabit. Here, as in previous fictions, Walker the storyteller is spellbinding, Walker the preacher-theorist, less so. On the other hand, what other novelist risks so bravely or with such generosity, and seeks to give so much? With the proper mindset, Walker assures us, anyone can become a member of the Mundo tribe. --Joyce Thompson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

A passionate but somewhat misguided polemic against the abuses of patriarchy, Walker's first novel since Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) tells the story of two daughters who overcome the sexual repression forced on them by their anthropologist father. In the early 1940s, the Robinson family travels to rural Mexico, where Mr. Robinson (who, unnamed, narrates most of the novel from beyond the grave) and his wife, Langley, are studying a doomed people known as the Mundo, the wise, egalitarian descendants of escaped slaves and Indians. The central event of the book comes when Mr. Robinson, ordinarily a gentle man, finds his 15-year-old daughter Magdalena having sex with a local boy, Manuelito, and beats her, in a scene witnessed by Magdalena's younger sister, Susannah. To the relief of Mr. Robinson's repentant ghost, both daughters find ways of fulfilling themselves despite this trauma: after an encounter with a fortune-telling dwarf (the village outcast in the native home of Susannah's Greek husband), Susannah leaves her husband and enters into a loving lesbian relationship; Magdalena, now a hugely obese academic, bumps into Manuelito (now an alcoholic, crippled, impotent Vietnam vet) on an airplane and, against all odds?in the book's one disappointingly reticent love scene?reconsummates their love. The deeper reconciliation between father and daughters takes place in the spirit realm. Even Walker's fans are likely to find the novel hard going, as the narrative moves confusingly back and forth between living and dead characters, the past and the present. Between the highly schematic plot and the characters' habit of speaking in self-righteous pieties and (fictitious) indigenous proverbs, Walker can test one's patience. Yet her spare, charged language, and her earnestness (whatever one may think of her extravagant historical claims or her essentialism in matters of race) will no doubt continue to win her a wide readership. Author tour. Editor, Kate Medina; agent, Wendy Weil.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 243 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (Mm) (October 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345434552
• ISBN-13: 978-0345434555
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 4.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,057,546 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alice Walker is one of the most prolific writers of our time, known for her literary fiction, including the Pultizer Prize-winning The Color Purple, her many volumes of poetry, and her powerful nonfiction collections. Walker's most recent book is The Chicken Chronicles, a memoir. Her advocacy for the dispossessed has spanned the globe. She lives in Northern California.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not for everyone!, December 26, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: By the Light of My Fathers Smile (Paperback)

Alice Walker is one of those writers whose work has the power to reach out and touch you when you need it most. This and I believe many of her other works are meant to be read at certain critical points in a specific persons life. Points when it is necessary to come to terms with a particular complex of issues. I thought it was telling when one reviewer said that the pre-occupation by some of the characters in this book with their personal traumas was unrealistic. Trauma is by its very nature pre-occupying. And what becomes lodged in an individual persons psyche as a result of the trauma they have experienced is typically unique to that individual (no one can judge the magnitude of pain in anothers heart). As a person who has been hurt reading the words of Alice Walker not only lets me know that another is serving as a witness to my pain it also shows me that there is joy waiting behind a door that I hadn't even realized existed. And it is in those moments that I feel truly blessed my her writing. Perhaps this and her other works are not perfect, in truth they are not. But in that moment when she has captured the pain in ones heart and soul, given it voice and a means to move forward who cares if it isn't the perfect novel? I guess those who haven't felt the coldness of a heart alone and bereft. For my part I say thank you Alice and keep writing, at least for me!

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely Captivating!, August 16, 2000

By 

Maurice Williams "mauricewms" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: By the Light of My Father's Smile: A Novel (Paperback)

By The Light of My Father's Smile explores the past, present, and future connection of the female characters in the novel to their father. Walker uses a multi-voiced approach in revealing the complexities of relationships both parental and romantic. The characters' speak from both life and deaths experiences revealing to the reader that issues not resolved in life must certainly be reconciled in death. Walker delivers insight and wisdom through the use of folklore, and the spiritual philosophy of an ancient Mexican/African tribe. She is able to demonstrate with clarity how male oppression of women, specifically a father's oppression of his daughter, effects a woman emotionally, sexually, and spiritually. A definite must read for the masses.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a stunning creation, October 16, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: By the Light of My Father's Smile: A Novel (Paperback)

I knew Alice Walker's name, but had never read her, and thus it was on a whim that I plucked this book from the library shelf.

By the Light of My Father's Smile is easily the best reading I have ever enjoyed. Walker's words are beautiful, grotesque, gentle, raw, passionate,honest. Her lovemaking scenes are intensely physical and emotional; metaphors about life itself and not the characters individually, and deliciously loving. It was refreshing to see a male point of view from a female writer, a male point of view on sexuality, a deceased male point of view on his daughter's intimate lives and his impact therein.

I read this book with no preconceived notions about Walker's writing style, no idea what the context of the book would hold, no expectations of character development, description, or prose--and I'll repeat, this is the best book that I have ever enjoyed. I have returned it to the library, but plan to purchase it to add to my small collection of books that make me feel so good I read them over and over.