Distant Fathers
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
The extraordinary autobiography of novelist Marina Jarre, tracing her identity and relationships through a turbulent era of European history.
'Beautifully ingenious' Vivian Gornick
'Her masterwork' New York Times
'Rich and lyrical... Jarre's life is fascinating' New Statesman
'Ann Goldstein's shimmering translation of Jarre's prose delivers into English a European masterpiece' Benjamin Taylor
'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century' Il Libraio
In distinctive, lyrical prose Jarre depicts an exceptionally multinational and complicated family: her elusive, handsome father, a Jewish man who perished in the Holocaust; her severe, cultured mother, an Italian Lutheran who translated Russian literature; her sister and Latvian grandparents. Shifting between past and present, Jarre narrates her coming-of-age; first as a linguistic minority in a Baltic nation and then in traumatic exile to Italy after her parents' divorce. There, she lived with her maternal grandparents among a community of French-speaking Waldensian Protestants and experienced the hostility of fascist Italy in the 1930s.
Published in Italy in 1987 and now translated into English for the first time, Distant Fathers probes questions of memory, language, womanhood, belonging and estrangement, while asking what a homeland can be for those who have none, or many more than one.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The late Italian novelist Jarre (1925–2016) reflects on her life in this kaleidoscopic memoir, here appearing in English for the first time. As she moves from her childhood in Riga, Latvia, to her adolescence in the 1930s living with her grandmother in Torre Pellice, Italy, after her parents' divorce, gems of language and ideas abound. She notes her jealousy of others' childhoods, fueled by "the unease I've always felt... the existence of that other I was not," and examines her anguished, vivid dreams—often involving evocative allusions to her parents—in an effort to reconcile her feelings of alienation. Introspection dominates her narrative, and she meditates on her marriage in 1949; motherhood ("I gave birth to myself along with my children"); life after having a hysterectomy; and her relationship with her mother, who "like a man drove me back into my place as a servant." While the fragmented structure requires close reading, Goldstein's analysis of Jarre's method, as provided in a translator's note ("Sudden changes of pace and tone and abrupt shifts in subject... always circle back, creating a kind of tightly controlled stream of consciousness"), will help readers appreciate her lyrical prowess. Those willing to embrace nonlinear storytelling will be taken with Jarre's haunting prose.
