Novel Description The Weight of All Things is a novel about war -- and the lunacy of it -- seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy. The battleground is El Salvador. The hero is Nicolas Veras. His story begins at the funeral of assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero. Along with thousands of others, Nicolas and his mother have crowded into the plaza of the capital's cathedral to pay homage. When gunfire erupts, pandemonium ensues. With bullets flying in all directions, his mother throws herself atop Nicolás to protect him and is killed. When medics arrive to take her body away, the boy believes she is only wounded. In the melee of the moment, he loses sight of her.

The attempt to find his mother begins an odyssey that leads from one peril to another. Nicolas searches through a merciless no-man's-land menaced by guerillas on the left and the army on the right. It is a search that ends in still another massacre and a heroic gesture by the boy who comes to understand, as grown-ups seemingly do not, that guns and violence are not the answer; that, in war, there are no winners, and that the ultimate losers are the innocent caught in the middle.

An Excerpt

Later, after the bombs went off, after the monstrous black clouds they sent up dissipated in the gentle breeze, after the shooters, whoever they might have been, pocketed their stubby handguns and vanished into the crowd, after the police ceased returning fire and attempted instead, with their superior presence, to control a multitude run amuck, it would be clear it was a bullet to the head that killed her.

But for now, she was alive. Until the shooting, the crowd had filled the cathedral to overflowing; it had backed up against the doors, spilled down the broad steps and out into the plaza where tens of thousands of El Salvador's faithful drove elbows and shoulders into each other, where but a dozen held umbrellas over their heads as a hedge against the sun, and the majority stood acceptingly in the heat, sweat staining half-moons under their arms and triangles over their breast-bones. Everywhere there was the stale odor of humanity pressed together in mourning.

Because she and the boy had come early, she had won for them a coveted spot: they stood against the iron-railed barricade separating the general crowd from the cathedral doors and from Archbishop Romero's casket positioned there, plain and unadorned, on the landing above the steps. The casket gleamed in the noonday sun. It rested beneath a banner draped over the church entrance, a banner imprinted with Monseñor's beloved bull-dogish face.

When the bombs went off, the solemn silence maintained by the multitude was debased by shouts and cries pitched high with surprise and then with terror. When the pakpakpak! of pistols started up, the brrrttt! of automatic weapons began, the crowd broke apart and scrambled for cover. She and the boy were pressed instantly against the barricade, but she held his arm in a fierce grip lest the swell and sway of the people sweep him from her. She tried scrambling over the barricade because it was only waist high; she thought they both could make it, but there were people jammed against the other side, too. Bullets whizzed by from both directions. Because he was not a husky boy and there was only so much they could do against the riptide of the people, he folded at her feet, his slender back against the barricade.

She used rapid blows from her elbows to gouge a space around him. She dropped down upon him, draping herself over him as if she were a truce flag. She did it because she was his mother. She did it because just yesterday she had gone to fetch him from Chalatenango, the region to the north where he lived with his grandfather; because this morning she had brought him on the bus to San Salvador, a dangerous journey over guerrilla-held land, but a necessary journey if her son were someday to state: When I was nine, I attended the funeral of a martyred saint.”

Reviews

"In this graceful and unabashedly tenderhearted novel, the politics behind the fighting is almost beside the point."
The New York Times

"The sheer amount of historical and cultural detail, as well as the pointed and precise descriptive work, are wonderfully rewarding."
The Chicago Tribune

"Benitez spins a lyrically heart-rending tale of a nine-year-old boy's confrontation with war."
The Washington Post

"Benitez' third novel . . . seamlessly blends fact with imagination, evoking the trauma of war more vividly than any newspaper account."
Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"If your book club wants to know what to read this year, I wholeheartedly recommend The Weight of All Things. This odyssey if for all of us who are looking for 'a place where the river is wider and the water is not as deep.' "
Mickey Pearlman, author of What to Read: The Essential Guide for Reading Group Members and Other Book Lovers

"A deeply affecting and startling portrait of a country ravaged by warring factions and the innocent people caught, quite literally, in the crossfire."
Book Magazine

Reader's Guide

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