DISTANT FATHERS

Midcentury European novelist Jarre (1925-2016) recalls the lifetime of dislocations that formed her changing sense of self.

Originally published in Italy in 1987, the book is translated by Goldstein, known for her work on Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. Jarre’s memoir opens with Goldstein's comments and a critical introduction by Marta Barone, who is overseeing the reissue of Jarre's works in Italian, hoping to restore her to "her rightful place in Italian literature." Barone aptly characterizes the author's virtues in this lament: "Why have her extraordinary novels and her unique voice, cool and searching, yet ironic, tender, brutal, and astonishingly attentive to life and its details—why has all this, all together, not endured?" The memoir is divided into three parts: childhood, adolescence, marriage and motherhood. Born in Riga, Latvia, Jarre and her sister moved to Italy with their mother after their parents split up (her Jewish father later died in the Holocaust). They lived with their French-speaking, Protestant grandparents outside then-fascist Turin. Jarre shows how her writerly perspective emerged with this first dislocation. "Time entered my life when I arrived in Torre Pellice with my sister,” she writes. “It gave me for the first time a past…the story of my childhood was what remained to me of my preceding existence, since in the space of a few weeks I changed country, language, and family circle." She goes on to describe the herb garden that her mother planted in their new home. One of the throughlines of the book is Jarre’s difficult relationship with her seemingly cold mother. In the third section, in which she wrestles with the writing of this memoir, we see the two conferring about the details of that very passage. Like Nabokov's Speak, Memory, this book is more concerned with time and perspective than narrative storytelling, though Jarre is more like Ferrante in her lack of nostalgia and unflinching focus on the difficulties of relationships.

Connoisseurs of literary memoir will enjoy Jarre's precise way of capturing emotional experiences.