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Winner of the 2023 Berman Literature Prize
Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize
Longlisted for the National Book Awards: Translated Literature
Longlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize
Longlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award
An exciting contemporary Russian writer explores terra incognita: the still-living margins of history.
With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century.
In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities, offering an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
“The hybrid book that Ms. Stepanova has finally produced presents gleanings from her family archives alongside the labyrinthine narrative of her ‘search for the past,’ which she concedes is incomplete and in many ways unsuccessful. And amidst the personal artifacts are essay-like meditations on the tensions that inhere within any act of remembrance. The result is a rich, digressive, deeply introspective work.” —Wall Street Journal
“Stepanova’s finely crafted debut follows a woman’s lifelong efforts to better understand her ancestors, Russian Jews whose stories fascinated her as a child growing up in the Soviet Union.” —Publishers Weekly
“In Memory of Memory is a stunning and ambitious reckoning with the fragility of memory, the Jewish imperative to remember, and the unbridgeable chasm separating us from our ancestors.” —Ali Hassani, BOMB Magazine
“[Stepanova is] a writer who will likely be spoken about in the same breath as Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk and Belarus’s Svetlana Alexievich in years to come… 2021 is the year of Stepanova.” —The Guardian
“[A] daring combination of family history and roving cultural analysis… a kaleidoscopic, time-shuffling look at one family of Russian Jews throughout a fiercely eventful century.” —The New York Times
“A remarkable work of the imagination—and, yes, memory.” —Kirkus Review
448 Pages
8.50in * 5.50in * 1.40in
580.00gr
1.00lb
March 02, 2021
9781771666596
eng
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