Listen
A Memoir
-
- $17.99
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
Listen is a memoir of voices, the voices of parents that linger in the ears of children until the day when those children are able to sound their own note. A domineering father and a professor of languages and literature in the 1950s and '60s, Victor has four women trapped in his orbit-his long-suffering wife and his three well-behaved daughters. "Teacher, poet, translator" is how he wants his gravestone to read, and in life he is dedicated to passing on to his family the great cultural achievements of western civilization-poetry, philosophy, religion, music, art. But he leaves darker gifts as well, in particular to his daughter Wendy the most traumatic legacy of all: incest. A major achievement and a stunning debut, Listen is about how families shape their memories and how even things that are never spoken about have potent echoes. It's also a memoir that chronicles a poet's apprenticeship to words, the story of a daughter who listened and who, with the gift for poetry her father gave her, learned to translate the darkest secrets of their past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
His epitaph reads "TEACHER, POET, TRANSLATOR." Salinger, in this memoir of her father (whom she refers to as Victor), leaves a full portrait of the man in the shadows from which she gleans a two-part personal and family history ("Life Before Death"; "Life After Death"). With creative control and telling imagery, poet Salinger (Folly River) renders the everyday absorbing. Shifting voice, recreated internal and external dialogue, suggestion, nuance and detail draw readers voyeuristically into the marriages, births, school days, hospital stays, aging, ailments and deaths of Salinger's family headed by an abusive, self-centered, self-indulgent artist father. "All families," according to the voice Salinger gives her mother, "have their secrets." Although political items (civil rights sit-ins, fallout shelters) set the historical context, Salinger, particularly in the second section, veils the personal through stream-of-consciousness monologue and allusive private poems. Eulogy and indictment remain unresolved. Salinger has two burdens: to honor her father ("The hand that guided me. That put the pen in my hand") and to struggle through the recovered memory of his sexual abuse ("Way back. Way far away. A long, long time ago, he put his hand there"). In this tender and tough remembering, Victor's line "He who understands all forgives all" may enlighten but not assuage.
