Body and Bread
Nan Cuba, 2013
Engine Books
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781938126062
Summary
Body and Bread is a story of grief and redemption.
Years after her brother Sam’s suicide, Sarah Pelton remains unable to fully occupy her world without him. Now, while her surviving brothers prepare to sell the family’s tenant farm and a young woman’s life hangs in the balance, Sarah is forced to confront the life Sam lived and the secrets he left behind. As she assembles the artifacts of her family’s history in East Texas in the hope of discovering her own future, images from her work as an anthropologist—images of sacrifice, ritual, and rebirth—haunt her waking dreams.
In this moving debut novel, Nan Cuba unearths the power of family legacies and the indelible imprint of loss on all our lives.
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—the state of Texas, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Warren Wilson College
• Awards—PEN Southwest Fiction Award
• Currently—San Antonio, Texas
Nan Cuba is the author of Body and Bread (Engine Books, 2013), winner of the PEN Southwest Award in Fiction, one of “Ten Titles to Pick Up Now” in O, Oprah’s Magazine, and a “Summer Books” choice from Huffington Post. She also co-edited Art at our Doorstep: San Antonio Writers and Artists (Trinity University Press, 2008), and published other work in such journals as Quarterly West, Columbia, Antioch Review, Harvard Review, storySouth, and Connotation Press.
As an investigative journalist, she reported on the causes of extraordinary violence in LIFE, Third Coast, and D Magazine. She was a runner-up for the Humanities Texas Individual Award and twice for the Dobie Paisano Fellowship. She received an artist residency at Fundación Valparaiso in Spain and the Imagineer Award from the Mind Science Foundation.
Cuba serves on the Board of Directors of Friends of Writers, Inc., which is a fundraising arm of the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College, is the founder and executive director emeritus of Gemini Ink, a nonprofit literary center, and writer-in-residence at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
Follow Nan on Facebook.
Book Reviews
Years after her brother Sam’s suicide, as her family prepares to sell their farm, anthropologist Sarah Pelton digs into the secrets Sam left behind while attempting to live fully without him.
Abbe Wright - O, Oprah's Magazine
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Body and Bread is a beautiful examination of family dynamics in the wake of suffering, and the ways that grief continues to shape our lives far beyond the death of a loved one.
Pam Johnston - San Antonio Express-News
Sam was her polestar, the big brother Sarah always looked up to, the one who could be a little wild, a little defiant, a little mysterious.... For Sam, however, the quest would not end until he had physically destroyed the source of his self-inflicted pain... Despite its erratic narrative arc...Cuba’s piercing coming-of-age saga vibrates with youthful yearnings. —Carol Haggas
Booklist
Like every person, every family contains contradictions, oppositions. Think of the generally quiet, sober couple who produce a jokester or chatterbox. Or the child who in church looks past her brothers’ and sisters’ bowed heads, searching for fellow doubters. Such contradictions may develop into deep conflicts or become a source of wonder, even pride. Either way, they can be a powerful force; that's just one truth examined in Nan Cuba's sweeping, carefully observed debut novel, Body and Bread.
Beth Castrodale - Small Press Picks
The plot’s literal events center on young Sarah’s gradual estrangement from her family and adult Sarah’s efforts to help her late brother’s widow and child. But as with Salinger, Cuba’s plot is almost incidental. Her writerly strengths lie in morsels of feeling perfectly put, and experiences rendered with unsettling aptness.
Emily dePrang - Texas Observer
Beautifully written, hauntingly true, expertly spanning multiple cultures, time periods and philosophies, Body and Bread is nothing short of a tour-de-force. You will be transported. You will be transformed.
David Bowles - Monitor (McAllen, Texas)
Like Munro, Cuba knows how to immerse us in the eloquent, intelligent, and unpretentious consciousness of a woman whose fidelity is to the unraveling of the many layers of truth that lay hidden, like ancient civilizations, beneath the surface of time. This truth scavenging makes Body and Bread an emotionally, ethically, and aesthetically riveting experience.
K.L. Cook, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment
Nan Cuba’s Body and Bread could be the quintessential Texas novel for the twenty-first century. Body and Bread focuses on several generations of the Pelton family, their relationship to Texas, and those issues of family, tragedy, illness, and kinship. Like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Cuba’s Texas is rich with history and tainted with deceptions revolving around slavery and race relations in the South.
Catherine Kasper - Texas Books in Review
Discussion Questions
1. Sarah says that her university colleagues close their office doors when she walks past, her brothers haven't spoken to her in years, and she lives by herself in a sparsely furnished house. She has no friends, and she hasn't been involved in a romantic relationship for quite a while. She dislikes freshmen and is rude when Terezie first comes to ask for help. Do these facts make Sarah an unsympathetic character?
2. At end of the first chapter, Sarah raises her hand to block out everyone in her family except Sam. Why does she do that, and why does she feel close to this brother?
3. When Sam guts the fish, his actions seem grotesque, even cruel. He says that sometimes you have to do ugly things. What does he mean, and what does this imply about him?
4. Sarah’s mother, Norine, seems strong willed and independent in chapter one when she throws the horse’s reins at the grandfather. But when she tells the story about Otis dying, she seems racist and wants Sarah to submit to gender expectations. How do you explain this change?
5. When Sarah recalls Otis telling his Master Sam stories, she says she hopes he didn't skew them according to what he thought she wanted to hear. Later, when she sits in the USO with her girlfriends and the two soldiers, she admits she’s confused about how to act with Tyrone, who is black. Is Sarah racist?
6. References to a steam engine and a fish act as motifs throughout the novel. What do these images symbolize?
7. Why is Sarah having hallucinations? What triggers them, and why do they always include a Mexicha god? How do they operate as a structuring device in the novel?
8. Sarah’s research focuses on rituals that include an iziptla. What is an iziptla, and how does it relate to Sarah and Sam?
9. What does Sarah’s life-long interest in the Mesoamerican culture, various theologies, and metaphysics reveal about her? Is it an admirable pursuit or an obsession?
10. Sarah’s father is a moralist, biblical scholar, traditionalist, and dedicated physician. How could someone with his convictions become romantically involved with Ruby? How would you describe his feelings about Sam?
11. When Sarah’s father leaned over the midden at the farm and said that if Sam hadn't reported his findings, he'd stolen from his heritage, how was that literally true?
12. Describe cultural differences between the Peltons and the Cervenkas. Why is this significant to the story?
13. Settings such as the farm creek, the Cervenkas’ house, the cotton field, the hospital anatomy lab, the coastal house, and the water therapy pool are vividly described. Why is so much attention given to the settings? How do they function as more than simple backdrops?
14. Some of the scenes between Sarah and Cornelia incorporate humor. Can you find any other places that are humorous?
15. What is the source of Sam’s ambiguity, rebelliousness, and unpredictability? Is his behavior an emotional reaction to his parentage, could he be suffering from a mood disorder, or do you detect something else?
16. When Sam’s taxi drove off the ramp, was that an accident or did he do it on purpose?
17. Why does Sarah press against Sam in the pool during water therapy? Is she sexually aroused, or are her actions a manifestation of her longing for an emotional connection? Would you describe her actions as immoral?
18. Grief and guilt are always effects of a family member’s suicide. Do Sarah’s parents and brothers each seem to feel responsible for Sam’s death? If so, how do you know?
19. What does Terezie’s lack of health insurance suggest about our country’s rising costs of medical care?
20. Do you agree with Kurt and Hugh that since Terezie has started a new family and the Peltons haven't seen her in thirty years, she does not have a claim on the grandparents’ coastal house?
21. Do you agree with Kurt that he has a moral obligation to be a steward of his inheritance, even if his commitment jeopardizes Cornelia’s health?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)