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Summary
Summary
This moving fictional memoir begins as a woman heads home after a meeting regarding her inheritance. Rebeling against the legalese uttered by the attorney, her mind drifts back to her childhood and she sees her life with sudden clarity. On the train, she jots down a few notes, which prompt the poetic outpouring of memory and emotion that make up this delicate novel.
The narrator's mother looms large in her psyche. Labeled "eccentric" or "Italian," her mother in fact suffered from what was later found to be manic depression. Without understanding the disease, the family treated the unpredictable ups and downs of her condition as they struck. During periods of paralyzing depression she was hospitalized, and the family felt abandoned. During periods of manic productivity and overdrive, she was a dedicated pharmacist, an exemplary homemaker, and an unusually knowledgeable gardener.
This sparse novel draws the portrait of a grand and unforgettable lady, loving and unable to love at once. Her bequest is as much a material one as it is an emotional one, and, the author surmises as she glances at her own daughters, a genetic one.
Author Notes
FLORENCE NOIVILLE is the author of Isaac B. Singer: A Life , which won the Prix du Recit biographique in 2003. She is a literary critic for Le Monde and lives in Paris.
CATHERINE TEMERSON 's translations include Amin Maalouf's Origins (2008), Elie Wiesel's The Sonderberg Case , Florence Noiville's Isaac B. Singer: A Life (Northwestern, 2008), and Hiner Saleem's My Father's Rifle: A Childhood in Kurdistan (2004).
Reviews (1)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this "fictional memoir" by Noiville, a Le Monde literary critic and the author of 2003's Isaac B. Singer: A Life, a woman returns to her place of birth to take possession of "the gift"-her childhood home. As the family lawyer reads the details of her inheritance, the narrator remembers her early years, characterized by her beautiful Italian mother's mental illness, which forced her often to abandon her two daughters while she went away for treatment. Just as her mother received her diagnosis of manic depression, this choppy narrative reads like her daughter's diagnosis of her own childhood. And, like any diagnosis, it is maddeningly reductive; characters are left undeveloped, moments are cut short, the narrative has little depth as it unfolds in a series of mostly two- to three-paged chapters. The reader is left with the impression that the people who populate this book are not "real" human beings, but ghosts, through whom we can see all too easily. (June 26) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
