Migratory Birds
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the PEN Translation Prize
"Pondering revolutionary Cuba, the Berlin Wall, and the caves of Cappadocia, these essays explore themes of memory, war, movement, and home."—The New Yorker
"A thoughtful, roving meditation on migration, language, and home."—Publishers Weekly
In her prize-winning debut, Mexican essayist Mariana Oliver trains her gaze on migration in its many forms, moving between real cities and other more inaccessible territories: language, memory, pain, desire, and the body. With an abiding curiosity and poetic ease, Oliver leads us through the underground city of Cappadocia, explores the vicissitudes of a Berlin marked by historical fracture, recalls a shocking childhood exodus, and recreates the intimacy of the spaces we inhabit. Blending criticism, reportage, and a travel writing all her own, Oliver presents a brilliant collection of essays that asks us what it means to leave the familiar behind and make the unfamiliar our own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Essayist Oliver debuts with a thoughtful, roving meditation on migration, language, and home. In intimate pieces studded with references to history and literature, Oliver ponders such topics as the tug of home and the consequences of dislocation. In the title essay, she imagines the interior life of Bill Lishman, a Canadian naturalist and inventor who studied avian migration patterns. While trying to save birds in danger of extinction, Lishman discovered that chicks born in captivity could be helped to migrate and return from whence they came, leading Oliver to conclude that "home is also a recording from childhood, an implanted memory." "The Other Lost Boys and Girls" sees Oliver blending reportage with evocative prose from a trip to Old Havana, where a U.S.-funded scare campaign in the 1960s said that the state would take children from their parents, which resulted in over 14,000 children being sent to Florida, the devastating consequences of which reverberated for decades. In "Ozdamar's Tongue," she ruminates on the writer Emine Sevgi Ozdamar, who moves from Turkey to Germany and finds refuge in the "indeterminate foreignness" of a new language. Oliver's dreamlike, intelligent musings don't always cohere with the narrative's broader theme of migration, but few will begrudge following this exciting writer as she experiments and explores. Fans of lyrical essays will enjoy this literary global odyssey.
