Distant Parents, by Marina Jarre

There was a time when Europe was an uncomfortable world to be born in, where children came into the world amidst nostalgia, uprooting, alienation and even the fear of their parents. Today the matter has shifted to other parts of the planet. The question is to look back on a recent Europe to regain that empathy that is increasingly parked today. And recovering a work like this by Marina Jarre achieves that withdrawal of time towards the necessary memory.

Beyond ethnocentrisms and borders, life always makes its way through the damp cloths of the only royal flag, of the only home that could be felt, like an old instinct, when arriving at a world in ruins. Motherhood and fatherhood were then hard commitments rather than simple questions on which to build a future. But nature always followed its course and the most remote hopes justified the arrival of offspring. Another thing was the way to survive afterwards, loading an education focused on the Spartan with the necessary harshness or omitting emotional aspects so as not to end up succumbing to sadness. Although he loved himself, of course, more than anything in the world.

What is the homeland of those who do not have it or of those who have more than one? These unique memories begin during the 1920s in the capital of a vibrant and multicultural Latvia and expand into the transalpine valleys of Mussolini's fascist Italy. With a distinctive and precise handwriting, Marina Jarre describes the process of disintegration of a family as exceptional as it is conflictive: her handsome and irresponsible father, a German-speaking Jew, victim of the Shoah; his cultured and stern mother, an Italian Protestant who translated Russian literature; his sister Sisi, his French-speaking grandparents ...

Distant parentsA delicate contemporary classic of Italian literature, he examines with exquisite lucidity issues such as the perpetual reconstruction of one's own identity or the always unstable divide between geographical and emotional territory. A fascinating life journey punctuated by family fractures and historical tragedies that emerge brilliantly in this beautiful exercise of memory and reunion, often compared to the most personal books by Vivian Gornick or Natalia Ginzberg.

You can now buy the book «The distant parents», by Marina Jarre, here:

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