ALL THE WATER I’VE SEEN IS RUNNING: A Novel
by Elias Rodriques
W.W. Norton & Company. 255 pages, $26.95
WHEN DANIEL HENRIQUEZ, the protagonist of All the Water I’ve Seen Is Running, calls his mother in Jamaica to report the death of Aubrey, a girl he knew back in high school, his mom reminisces about people in her life who have died, including Daniel’s uncle, who left before Daniel was born. She’s sad but also practical. It is, as she says, “just the price of surviving.” Surviving is its own type of movement, and movement is the underlying theme of this debut novel by Elias Rodriques.
There is movement between the past and present, for example, in the narrative of Daniel, a twenty-something, gay high school English teacher of Jamaican, Lebanese, and Trinidadian heritage. We know that he lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and that he’s dating a man named Virgil, but that’s about all we know about his life in New York. Instead,
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Philip Moore is an assistant professor of education at Gratz College in Melrose Park, PA.
