Description
Deploying a multiplicity of narrative forms, from fiction to memoir to essay, Stepanova’s chronicle of her Russian-Jewish family’s turbulent course through the twentieth century is a tour de force of intellectual and philosophical curiosity.
Longlisted for the International Booker Prize2021
With the death of her aunt, Maria Stepanova 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Dipping into various forms - essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue and historical documents - Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
Number of pages: 448
Dimensions: 197 x 125 mm