Misophonia
A Novel
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- $299.00
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- $299.00
Descripción editorial
In the vein of Fleishman is in Trouble and Elif Batuman—an insightful, heartfelt, and hilarious debut exploring cultural diaspora through one teenager’s summer across Berlin, Jerusalem, and Chicago
It’s another scorching summer in Chicago, and fifteen-year-old Margarita is spending her vacation as usual, under the not-so-watchful eyes of her aging maternal grandparents. All told, the plucky teen would much rather be at home in Germany, exploring Berlin with her best friend, Anna, or with Avi, her doting Israeli father, a cantor at their local synagogue with whom she has shared a special bond ever since her mother, Marsha, abandoned the family. Instead, she’s stuck halfway around the world, homesick and tortured by the sound of her grandparents’ chewing.
But when arrangements are made behind her back for her to meet Marsha in Israel before returning to Germany, Margarita is blindsided. She wants no part of this overdue reconciliation with a mother she hardly knows/ When her mother fails to show, however, things go awry. Meanwhile, in Germany, Avi tries to fill the hole left by Margarita’s absence with a trip of his own, embarking on a personal journey, both hope-inducing and despairing.Expertly straddling the two narratives of daughter and father, Misophonia is a graceful exploration of imperfect family relationships and larger cultural displacement.
Translated from the German by Adrian Nathan West
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Jewish German teen gets caught up in her family's drama in Vowinckel's ambitious if uneven debut. In summer 2023, Margarita, 15, is visiting her maternal grandparents in Chicago, where she spends most of her time repulsed by her grandmother's terrible cooking and pining for a boy back in Berlin. Her father, Avi, an Israeli who moved to Germany to serve as a cantor before she was born, has sent her to Chicago to practice English and foster her relationship with her grandparents even though Marsha, their daughter and Margarita's mother, abandoned her and Avi more than a decade earlier. Margarita is blindsided when the adults decide to send her to Jerusalem, where Marsha is on a fellowship. Marsha fails to show up at the airport, leaving Margarita unattended for a night. The novel begins with fast-paced chapters that abruptly alternate between Margarita's and her father's points of view, but it gains substance when Avi shows up in Israel. There, tempers flare as nonobservant Marsha mocks Avi's piety and excoriates his decision to stay in Germany, where antisemitism remains rife, while Margarita takes her mother's criticism of Germany personally ("It's not like I want to be German," she tells her mother. "I just am"). Readers will appreciate this nuanced look into a Jewish family's divisions.
