A Feather on the Breath of God: A Novel

Sigrid Nunez

Dec 2005 · Sold by Picador

About this ebook

From Sigrid Nunez, the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend, comes A Feather on the Breath of God: a mesmerizing story about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love

A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, she escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning, homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet--these are the elements that shape the young woman's imagination and her sexuality.

Ratings and reviews

A talented writer's first-person narrative, where the author, Sigrid Nunez, explores her immigrant parents and the impact family relationships have had on her own life. Employing a distinctive, stream-of-consciousness style, Nunez shares sometimes random memories which, when taken together, paint rich, multi-dimensional images of her parents. They are both remote, complex, and struggling to fit into an America which does meet their expectations. And they are fundamentally mismatched. Her Chinese-Panamanian father works so many hours, in low-paying jobs, that he barely has tiime for ANY relationship with his wife and children. Her stay-at-home mother, a German immigrant, is deeply unhappy and longs to return to her homeland, complaining to her family all the time. Neither parent loves the other and their fights provide a continuous soundtrack to the lives of their young daughters. As a teen, the narrator eventually finds some satisfactory escape and identity in studying ballet -- in appreciating its beauty, recognizing its inherent sexism, and through exposure to fellow students from more privileged backgrounds. Though determined not to marry, the author also describes an intense, long-term affair with a Russian immigrant -- one whose personal values and experiences differ so completely from her own. However, while the four portraits Nunez creates (father, mother, self, lover) are vibrant and complex, there is little story to this narrative. It feels much more like the author's recollections of episodes in her life. No one comes off as particularly admirable. The ending did not provide much resolution. Instead, it felt to me like A FEATHER ON THE BREATH OF GOD is a young writer's attempting to understand her parents' immigrant experience and the ways it damaged her.

About the author

Sigrid Nunez is the author of the novels For Rouenna and The Last of Her Kind. She has received several awards, including a Whiting Writers' Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. She lives in New York City.