More Than I Love My Life
A novel
(Sprache: Englisch)
INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE • A remarkable novel of suffering, love, and healing-the story of three generations of women on an unlikely journey to a Croatian island and a secret that needs to be told-from the internationally best-selling author of To...
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INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE • A remarkable novel of suffering, love, and healing-the story of three generations of women on an unlikely journey to a Croatian island and a secret that needs to be told-from the internationally best-selling author of To the End of the Land"A magnificent book ... The way Grossman writes about these regions is unique, with a deep understanding of our experience." -Josip Mlakic, Express (Croatia)
More Than I Love My Life is the story of three strong women: Vera, age ninety; her daughter, Nina; and her granddaughter, Gili, who at thirty-nine is a filmmaker and a wary consumer of affection. A bitter secret divides each mother and daughter pair, though Gili-abandoned by Nina when she was just three-has always been close to her grandmother.
With Gili making the arrangements, they travel together to Goli Otok, a barren island off the coast of Croatia, where Vera was imprisoned and tortured for three years as a young wife after she refused to betray her husband and denounce him as an enemy of the people. This unlikely journey-filtered through the lens of Gili's camera, as she seeks to make a film that might help explain her life-lays bare the intertwining of fear, love, and mercy, and the complex overlapping demands of romantic and parental passion.
More Than I Love My Life was inspired by the true story of one of David Grossman's longtime confidantes, a woman who, in the early 1950s, was held on the notorious Goli Otok ("the Adriatic Alcatraz"). With flashbacks to the stalwart Vera protecting what was most precious on the wretched rock where she was held, and Grossman's fearless examination of the human heart, this swift novel is a thrilling addition to the oeuvre of one of our greatest living novelists, whose revered moral voice continues to resonate around the world.
Lese-Probe zu „More Than I Love My Life “
Rafael was fifteen years old when his mother died and put him out of her misery. Rain poured down on the mourn-ers huddled under umbrellas in the small kibbutz cemetery. Tuvia, Rafael s father, sobbed bitterly. He had cared for his wife devotedly for years and now looked lost and bereft. Rafael, wearing shorts, stood apart from the others and pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his eyes so that no one would know he wasn t crying. He thought: Now that she s dead, she can see all the things I thought of her.That was in the winter of 1962. A year later his father met Vera Novak, who had come to Israel from Yugoslavia, and they became a couple. Vera had arrived with her only daughter, Nina, a tall, fair- haired girl of seventeen whose long face, which was pale and very beautiful, showed almost no expression.
The boys in Rafael s class called Nina Sphinx. They would sneak behind her and mimic her gait, the way she hugged her body and stared ahead vacantly. When she once caught two kids imitating her, she simply pummeled them bloody. They d never seen such fighting on the kibbutz. It was hard to believe how much ferocious strength she had in her thin arms and legs. Rumors started flying. They said that while her mother was a political prisoner in the Gulag, little Nina had lived on the streets. The streets, they said, with a meaningful look. They said that in Belgrade she d joined a gang of feral kids who kidnapped children for ransom. That s what they said. People say things.
The fight, as well as other incidents and rumors, failed to pierce the fog in which Rafael lived after his mother s death. For months he was in a self-induced coma. Twice a day, morning and evening, he took a powerful sleeping pill from his mother s medicine cabi-net. He didn t even notice Nina when he occasionally ran into her around the kibbutz.
But one evening, about six months after his mother died, he was taking a shortcut through the avocado orchard to the gym-nasium when Nina
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came toward him. She walked with her head bowed, hugging herself as if everything around her was cold. Rafael stopped, tensing up for reasons he did not understand. Nina was in her own world and did not notice him. He saw the way she moved. That was his first impression: her quiet, sparing motion. The lim-pid, high forehead, and a thin blue dress that fluttered halfway down her shins.
The expression on his face when he recounted
Only when they got closer did Rafael see that she was crying quiet, muffled sobs and then she noticed him and stopped, and curved inward. Their gazes entangled fleetingly and, one might sorrowfully add, inextricably. The sky, the earth, the trees, Rafael told me, I don t know . . . I felt like nature had passed out.
Nina was the first to recover. She gave an angry puff and hurried away. He had time to glimpse her face, which had instantly shed all expression, and something inside him coursed toward her. He held out his hand after her.
I can actually see him standing there with his hand out.
And that is how he s remained, with the outstretched hand, for forty- five years.
But that day, in the orchard, without thinking, before he could hesitate and trip himself up, he sprinted after her to tell her what he d understood the moment he d seen her. Everything had come to life inside him, he told me. I asked him to explain. He mumbled something about all the things that had fallen asleep in him during the years of his mother s illness, and even more so after her death. Now it was all suddenly urgent and fateful, and he had no doubt that Nina would yield to him right then and there.
Nina heard his footst
The expression on his face when he recounted
Only when they got closer did Rafael see that she was crying quiet, muffled sobs and then she noticed him and stopped, and curved inward. Their gazes entangled fleetingly and, one might sorrowfully add, inextricably. The sky, the earth, the trees, Rafael told me, I don t know . . . I felt like nature had passed out.
Nina was the first to recover. She gave an angry puff and hurried away. He had time to glimpse her face, which had instantly shed all expression, and something inside him coursed toward her. He held out his hand after her.
I can actually see him standing there with his hand out.
And that is how he s remained, with the outstretched hand, for forty- five years.
But that day, in the orchard, without thinking, before he could hesitate and trip himself up, he sprinted after her to tell her what he d understood the moment he d seen her. Everything had come to life inside him, he told me. I asked him to explain. He mumbled something about all the things that had fallen asleep in him during the years of his mother s illness, and even more so after her death. Now it was all suddenly urgent and fateful, and he had no doubt that Nina would yield to him right then and there.
Nina heard his footst
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Autoren-Porträt von David Grossman
David Grossman
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: David Grossman
- 2021, International, 288 Seiten, Masse: 13,7 x 20,3 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Übersetzer: Jessica Cohen
- Verlag: KNOPF
- ISBN-10: 1524712043
- ISBN-13: 9781524712044
- Erscheinungsdatum: 02.09.2021
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEECast[s] a spell that lingers . . . Grossman s evocative gifts are in full force [and] his understanding of the opaque ways of love sometimes subterranean, often unexpected or arbitrary is unmatched . . . [His] novels have a cumulative power that subsumes mere plausibility. He succeeds in transcending the permutations of his plots and the localness of his settings indeed, to make deliberate use of the Israeli template to create themes of loss, the redemptive power of love, the immutable scars of history and the consoling effect of humor that resonate well beyond the world of the kibbutz or the background of the Holocaust . . . To read [Grossman] is to understand that there is a world beyond the political, even in these re-tribalized times, one in which there is room for recognition, however incomplete and often painful, of who we are in our own eyes and in one another s. Daphne Merkin, The New York Times Book Reivew
A somber and affecting tale without recourse to undue melodrama or psychobabble. This delicately crafted novel, crisply translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen, is a fitting tribute to his friend. Houman Barekat, The Sunday Times (London)
Another extraordinary novel from Grossman, a book as beautiful and sad as anything you ll read this year . . . A book of secrets wrapped within secrets . . . It is a love story, a story about a family and their myriad individual tragedies. But it is also about the way that the personal can never be wholly separated from the political, about the lingering wounds of history, about how violence seeps into all the dark corners of a life. It is, in the end, about Israel. . . . Immaculately translated by Jessica Cohen. Alex Preston, The Observer
Concisely devastating . . . A powerful retelling of a Jewish woman s extraordinary life . . . A story so emotionally, ideologically and morally complex that it takes all of Grossman s
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considerable skills to render . . . He has demonstrated again that the novel elastic, expansive, amenable to painful fragmentation can provide a space for the most harrowing and resistant material. Alex Clark, The Guardian
Tender and disquieting . . . Grossman shines a light on the victims of the violent split between Tito and Stalin, as well as on the stories people tell themselves to explain, survive, and forgive. And in Vera, who is nimble and sharp at 90, endlessly self-mythologizing, and possessed of a broken Hebrew that Cohen renders into idiosyncratic broken English, the author has created an unforgettable character. This adds another remarkable achievement to Grossman s long list. Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The undeniable moral strength of his voice is informed by a sharp awareness of the complex treacheries of the last century; it also accepts its responsibility to battle against attempts to forget or minimize those traumas. Susan Miron, The Arts Fuse
Powerful . . . Grossman performs a deft exploration of how trauma impacts succeeding generations. Kristine Huntley, Booklist
Praise from abroad for More Than I Love My Life
To turn a true story into a true story universal and precise, haunted by destiny and graced with a complete humanity requires the wisdom of a narrator like Grossman. Alessandro Zaccuri, Avvenire (Italy)
A superb depiction of three generations of women in which the author fleshes out an absence. Florence Noiville, Le Monde (France)
Captivating . . . David Grossman is a master of the literature of redemption. Volker Weidermann, Der Spiegel (Germany)
To Grossman, it is something beyond politics and psychology that is important, something that is difficult to put into words, but which he nevertheless embodies: that life is, after all, better than death. Ingrid Elam, DN (Sweden)
Tender and disquieting . . . Grossman shines a light on the victims of the violent split between Tito and Stalin, as well as on the stories people tell themselves to explain, survive, and forgive. And in Vera, who is nimble and sharp at 90, endlessly self-mythologizing, and possessed of a broken Hebrew that Cohen renders into idiosyncratic broken English, the author has created an unforgettable character. This adds another remarkable achievement to Grossman s long list. Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The undeniable moral strength of his voice is informed by a sharp awareness of the complex treacheries of the last century; it also accepts its responsibility to battle against attempts to forget or minimize those traumas. Susan Miron, The Arts Fuse
Powerful . . . Grossman performs a deft exploration of how trauma impacts succeeding generations. Kristine Huntley, Booklist
Praise from abroad for More Than I Love My Life
To turn a true story into a true story universal and precise, haunted by destiny and graced with a complete humanity requires the wisdom of a narrator like Grossman. Alessandro Zaccuri, Avvenire (Italy)
A superb depiction of three generations of women in which the author fleshes out an absence. Florence Noiville, Le Monde (France)
Captivating . . . David Grossman is a master of the literature of redemption. Volker Weidermann, Der Spiegel (Germany)
To Grossman, it is something beyond politics and psychology that is important, something that is difficult to put into words, but which he nevertheless embodies: that life is, after all, better than death. Ingrid Elam, DN (Sweden)
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