Distant Fathers

By Marina Jarre and Ann Goldstein

The extraordinary autobiography of novelist Marina Jarre, tracing her identity and relationships through a turbulent era of European history.
'Beautifully ingenious' Vivian Gornick

'Her masterwork' New York Times

'Rich and lyrical... Jarre's life is fascinating' New Statesman

'Ann Goldstein's shimmering translation of Jarre's prose delivers into English a European masterpiece' Benjamin Taylor

'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century' Il Libraio

In distinctive, lyrical prose Jarre depicts an exceptionally multinational and complicated family: her elusive, handsome father, a Jewish man who perished in the Holocaust; her severe, cultured mother, an Italian Lutheran who translated Russian literature; her sister and Latvian grandparents. Shifting between past and present, Jarre narrates her coming-of-age; first as a linguistic minority in a Baltic nation and then in traumatic exile to Italy after her parents' divorce. There, she lived with her maternal grandparents among a community of French-speaking Waldensian Protestants and experienced the hostility of fascist Italy in the 1930s.

Published in Italy in 1987 and now translated into English for the first time, Distant Fathers probes questions of memory, language, womanhood, belonging and estrangement, while asking what a homeland can be for those who have none, or many more than one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Feb 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781803280929

Marina Jarre

Marina Jarre was born in 1925 in Riga to a Latvian Jewish father and an Italian Protestant mother. She spent her childhood in Latvia until 1935, when her parents separated and she moved to Italy to live with her maternal grandparents. By the time of her death in 2016, Jarre had written over a dozen novels, short story collections and works of non-fiction, of which Distant Fathers is hailed as her masterwork.

Reviews for Distant Fathers

[mykl8s · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Marina Jarre's memoir was published in 1987 when she was 62 and in the middle of her writing career, according to the introduction. Now it's available in an English translation by Ann Goldstein, and I'm glad. Jarre tells her story from the perspective of herself at 62, but often in the voice of whatever age she was at the time she is telling us about. As a little girl she worries "that I will grow up suddenly, in a single night," and will need to go buy clothes that fit her adult size while other grownups laugh at her in child's clothing. That's in the first of three chapters, "The Circle of Light." The second, "Pity and Anger," is about growing up through World War I in fascist Italy to adulthood. The final Chapter, "As a Woman," takes her to the time of writing her book, though she lived for another 29 years. There is much about her parents, a strong willed mother, an absent father, a grandmother who raised her, and the people around her. Jarre slips from one time period to another, sometimes in the middle of a paragraph, until I'm no longer surprised to realize that, for example, she is no longer talking about aiding the resistance fighters in a mountain village in 1940, but is now telling about her time teaching French and raising her children in post-war Turin. So the memoir comes to be about growing and becoming and memory, and trying to understand who she is and how she became the person she is. The book is worth planning a second read for me, to enjoy again and to notice some of what I've missed the first time through.

[snash_44 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A very self involved memoir, which churned over the author's relationship with her mother while stepping away from all the other traumas of her life. Given the singular repetitive obsession, the book wore thin with time and it was difficult to develop an empathy with the author.

[suesbooks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

this was a very strange memoir written by a woman very involved with herself. She presents the same perceptions numerous times as related to different events. the book was fairly interesting, but I was pleased that it was as short as it was. Jarre is obviously very intelligent, but she may not have really understood the motivations and actions both of herself and of others. She did learn well how to protect herself from most emotions, and therefore she seemed to tolerate war and the torture of others.