Customer Reviews

Night of the Radishes

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This is the story of Annie Hart Rush, who, as the book opens, is caring for her mother, who is dying of emphysema. When she dies it will be the latest in a series of devastating losses--first, her twin sister's death in a terrible accident--then her father's suicide. Then her brother Hub runs away from home, not to be heard from for twenty years. Oppressed with guilt and anger, Annie seems to function, but is slowing sinking into unshakable depression.

Annie's mother extracts a deathbed promise, that Annie will try to find the long-lost brother. And as she begins to do so, she will learn much about her family history and herself. Her search will lead not only to her missing brother, and to a new family in Mexico, but to a new understanding of her past, to forgiveness and redemption.

Author Sandra Benitez writes in graceful, lucid prose. Her characters are believable. The story is engaging, uplifting, and powerful. The cultural mix is intriguing too-- Mexico and Minnesota are both charmingly portrayed. If you are looking for a warm and fuzzy book, this is it. Be sure to have your handkerchief ready. The book is not perfect--maybe a little too sentimental, maybe a little too much psychology too glibly presented. Still, it works, and I enjoyed it. I recommend Night of the Radishes highly. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

Sandra Benitez continues to evolve as a writer, and has certainly avoided the trap of writing the same book over and over. This novel begins in the American midwest, and with a much more conventional feel then her previous works. But it then move into Mexico, and starts to pick up the latin magic of her earlier books. The story also becomes deeper and more nuanced, and thereby more compelling. Always marvelously written, by the end the story is a compelling mixture of midwestern solidity, psychological insight, and Mexican mysticism. It combines the very American dissection of a family gone bad with the overlay of latin magic revealing the facts. This helps to maintain the uncertainty about the outcome and the sense of discovery much longer than a more conventional American novel would have. This was not the Benitez work I liked the best, but it is an enjoyable read.

Night of the Radishes is the most recent novel by Sandra Benítez whose work Bitter Grounds was the American Book Award Winner in 1998. The action takes place in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Oaxaca, Mexico in late December. The title is taken from the custom of Oaxaqueño artisans who carve figures from large, hard and inedible radish roots, and enter these in a contest that takes place in the central Zócalo [town square] shortly before Christmas.
The protagonist, Annie Hart Rush, is wife of Sam-the "one boy who'll never leave you" [121]. She is also mother of Jack and Will; a psychologist/teacher who gives workshops on people skills for corporations; the daughter of a mother dying the slow suffocation of emphysema; and barely a survivor of tragic losses during her own childhood.
Annie's twin Maggie died a horrible death at a young age and then she lost her father. Her mother, a chain smoker, withdrew into a silent bitterness of anger. The lonely child suffered yet another loss when her older brother Hub ran away from home. She has never heard from him in the intervening 20 plus years.
Annie is the one who stayed, the "good daughter," whose streak of perfectionism reveals her attempts to set her world aright. Underneath her competency and efficiency lurks a corrosive guilt. She feels that somehow she herself triggered the painful losses in her life. And underneath the surface, lies a debilitating anger, anger that she -- the responsible child, the one who didn't abandon her home - is left to pick up everyone else's pieces and try to put the family back together again.
With the death of her mother come many surprises. Her mother made Annie promise that she would find her brother. Her mother also left a notebook in which she had written her feelings and revealed many family secrets. Annie cannot bear to read her mother's confessions. She launches an Internet search for her brother and tracks him to San Diego, California and there the trail just ends.
At this point, she receives a postcard from Oaxaca, addressed to her mother, with the message "I yam what I yam," a childhood saying from Hub's favorite character, Popeye. Receiving the postcard is both a clue to her brother's whereabouts and another stinging hurt for Annie. Her mother had received such post cards at different points since her son's departure and had never shared them with her daughter.
Annie follows the trail to Oaxaca. Here the author teases the reader with the many near misses the protagonist experiences while trying to find her brother. At the Casa Amapolas where she is staying, another guest, anthropologist Joe Cruz, befriends her and aids in the search. The two become soul mates as Joe is also recovering from a tragic loss for which he blames himself.
Yes, there is the inevitable reunion with her brother. But there is so much more as Annie discovers a whole new family.
The book is easy to read, driven as it is by the search, by the sense of mystery underlying past family events, and because we cheer for the protagonist to heal her family and her soul.
Joe is perhaps a bit too good to be true, too romantically ideal. He says things like "humble places are made spacious by love" [130] and "Hope...happens in a flash. The trick is to grab on to it when it presents itself" [154]. And it seems a bit too coincidental that Annie meet another plagued by similar guilt and anger after experiencing family tragedy. Nonetheless, Joe is so likeable, wise and selfless that we forgive the author and accept him anyway.
Benítez tells the tale in the first person and in the present tense with short sentences. This style makes the story vivid, intensely personal, rich in sensual detail and emotion. While the book is primarily Annie's story, there are chapters which switch to the third person and let us inside Hub as well. These chapters serve to increase the tension as the reader anticipates the reunion of these siblings and the confrontation that will take place.
There is a lot of wisdom wonderfully and simply worded, as for example in Joe's counsel to Annie. He encourages her to give voice to her anger, saying "there's no louder sound than the silent roar of unexpressed emotion" [160].
Wonderful also are the travels in Oaxaca revealing the culture and customs, the indigenous Mixtecan and Zapotecan peoples, the rich antiquity of Monte Albán and Mitla, the beauty of the geography, and a charismatic healer of souls in the person of Clarita.
Sandra Benítez has written other perhaps slightly more rewarding novels. A Place Where the Sea Remembers, (available in translation as Allí donde el mar recuerda), tells the story of the people in a small Mexican village. For me, the tone was more understated than in Night of the Radishes, and the emotional impact, therefore, more powerful. Bitter Grounds recounts the lives of three generations of two families in El Salvador and ends with the devastating civil war of the 1980's. I was fascinated. The Weight of All Things, (available in translation as El Peso de Todas las Cosas), deals with the life of a young boy whose mother is murdered while attending martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero's funeral in El Salvador. It's a moving story; at the same time it gave me an insight into how painful it is to be the poor, those struggling for a peaceful life for themselves and their families while terribly caught between the two sides of a civil war.

Reading this book was a great way for me to relive my own trip to Oaxaca at Christmastime. The Night of the Radishes, the Casa de Colonial, the beach at Puerto Angel ... it's a wonderful setting for a novel. I would have liked Benitez to delve more into the lives of the native Mexicans and Indians. What are their poverty-stricken lives really like? How can Americans learn from them? What did the characters learn about Mexico's indigenous population while driving over the mountains? Sadly, Benitez treats her characters like many Americans who travel to far away lands and never interact with the native cultures, and never talk to the native peoples. I felt very American reading this book, when I could have felt touched by another culture that is so different, and in many ways richer, than my own.

Annie Rush's mother just died and on her deathbed asked her daughter to find her brother. Carrying lots of emotional baggage, including the childhood accidental death of her twin sister and the suicide of her father, she goes to a small town in Mexico. There she discovers much about herself, life, her brother, and carving radishes. It was a good read!

A friend recommended the book after hearing that we were going to visit Oaxaca. The Oaxaca information was good, but the story was pretty cheesy. The subplot about Annie & Joe was pretty hard to believe. I know Benitez is a famous author, but I'm going to have a difficult time picking up one of her books again.