Professor Schiff's Guilt
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- ¥1,200
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- ¥1,200
発行者による作品情報
"A writer contends with slavery's legacy, and his own link to it . . . Daring in both scope and imagination."
—The New York Times
A stellar novel rendered into a darkly comic, unforgettable narrative by Booker International Prize winning translator Jessica Cohen. An Israeli professor travels to a fictitious West African nation to trace a slave-trading ancestor, only to be imprisoned under a new law barring successive generations from profiting off the proceeds of slavery. But before departing from Tel Aviv, the protagonist falls in love with Lucile, a mysterious African migrant worker who cleans his house. Entertaining and thought-provoking, this satire of contemporary attitudes toward racism and the legacy of colonialism examines economic inequality and the global refugee crisis, as well as the memory of transatlantic chattel slavery and the Holocaust. Is the professor’s passion for Africa merely a fashionable pose and the book he’s secretly writing about his experience there nothing but a modern version of the slave trade?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Schiff (The Latecomers) delivers a daring post-colonial satire about a professor who inadvertently gets wrapped up in human trafficking in modern-day Tel Aviv. Agur Schiff, 63, tries to collect a debt from a lawyer who, in lieu of money, "gives" Schiff his cleaning lady, an undocumented migrant named Lucile, as "payment." Schiff is deeply offended, but he immediately falls in love with the wise and beautiful Lucile. He pays her to work as a companion to his wife's wealthy, 104-year-old step-grandfather, who soon proposes marriage to Lucile, to the lovelorn professor's dismay. But before there can be a wedding, Lucile's husband shows up demanding a blackmail payment, and Schiff tips off the immigration authorities. The husband flees, but Lucile is then herself deported. Distraught over losing Lucile, the professor travels to an unnamed West African capital where the shipwrecked remains of his ancestor's merchant vessel are now in a museum, and where Schiff reckons with his family's involvement in the slave trade. The author takes a clear-eyed view of the horrors of slavery and its present-day consequences without slipping into didacticism or sacrificing the humor of his protagonist's absurd actions. It's a blistering skewering, and as sharp as it is funny.
