Distant Fathers
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"A beautifully ingenious memoir, saturated in the history of the European 20th century, and made all the more compelling by Ann Goldstein’s luminous translation.”
—Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments
This singular autobiography unfurls from author Marina Jarre’s native Latvia during the 1920s and '30s and expands southward to the Italian countryside. In distinctive writing as poetic as it is precise, Jarre depicts an exceptionally multinational and complicated family: her elusive, handsome father—a Jew who perished in the Holocaust; her severe, cultured mother—an Italian Protestant who translated Russian literature; and her sister and Latvian grandparents. Jarre tells of her passage from childhood to adolescence, first as a linguistic minority in a Baltic nation and then in traumatic exile to Italy after her parents’ divorce. Jarre lives with her maternal grandparents, French-speaking Waldensian Protestants in the Alpine valleys southwest of Turin, where she finds fascist Italy a problematic home for a Riga-born Jew. This memoir—likened to Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov or Annie Ernaux’s The Years and now translated into English for the first time—probes questions of time, language, womanhood, belonging and estrangement, while asking what 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.
