Diary of the Fall - Couverture souple

Laub, Michel

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0099581795 ISBN 13 : 9780099581796

Editeur : Vintage, 2015

A propos du livre

Quatrième de couverture :

A schoolboy prank goes horribly wrong, and a thirteen-year-old boy is left injured. Years later, one of the classmate relives the episode as he tries to come to terms with his demons.

Diary of the Fall is the story of three generations: a man examining the mistakes of his past, and his struggle for forgiveness; a father with Alzheimer’s, for whom recording every memory has become an obsession; and a grandfather who survived Auschwitz, filling notebook after notebook with the false memories of someone desperate to forget.

‘A gripping, thoughtful novel... By focussing on an act of childhood brutality and its mundane consequences, Laub beautifully retrieves the tragedy of the holocaust from its scholarship, politics and deniers, cutting to the bone of human life, its longings and limitations’
Independent

‘A fine, complex piece of writing that examines questions of guilt and responsibility for crimes large and small, and how, if possible, to atone for them’
New Statesman

‘A work of immense incantatory power’
Neel Mukherjee, Literary Review

‘A powerful and nuanced novel... Elegantly translated...it is bot timely and gratifying to see one of [Brazil’s] outstanding writers come to the attention of an English-language readership’
Financial Times

Extrait :

1. My grandfather didn’t like to talk about the past, which is not so very surprising given its nature: the fact that he was a Jew, had arrived in Brazil on one of those jam-packed ships, as one of the cattle for whom history appears to have ended when they were twenty, or thirty, or forty or whatever, and for whom all that’s left is a kind of memory that comes and goes and that can turn out to be an even worse prison than the one they were in.

2. In my grandfather’s notebooks, there is no mention of that journey at all. I don’t know where he boarded the ship, if he managed to get some sort of documentation before he left, if he had any money or at least an inkling of what awaited him in Brazil. I don’t know how long the crossing lasted, whether it was windy or calm, whether they were struck by a storm one night in the early hours, whether he even cared if the ship went down and he died in what would seem a highly ironic manner, in a dark whirlpool of ice and with no hope of being remembered by anyone except as a statistic—a fact that would sum up his entire biography, swallowing up any reference to the place where he had spent his childhood and the school where he studied and everything else that had happened in his life in the interval between being born and the day he had a number tattooed on his arm.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Vintage
• Date d'édition: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0099581795
• ISBN 13: 9780099581796
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 192