Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: House in Smyrna, The
Author: LEVY TATIANA SALEM
Format: PAPERBACK
Publication date: 28/01/2015
Imprint: SCRIBE
Price: $28.00
Publishing status: Active
From one of Brazil’s best young novelists comes a startling and powerful story about returning to the past in order to move forward.
In Rio de Janeiro, a woman suffering from a mysterious illness, which is eroding her body and mind, decides to take her grandfather up on a challenge: to take the key to the house where he grew up – in the Turkish city of Smyrna – and try to open the door.
As she embarks on this pilgrimage, she begins to write of her progress. This writing soon becomes an exploration of her family’s legacy of displacement in Europe, told in several narrative strands. Sifting through several generations of family stories – her grandfather’s migration from Turkey to Brazil, her parents’ exile in Portugal under the Brazilian military dictatorship, her mother’s death, and her own love affair with a violent man – she traces her family’s history in a journey to make sense of the past and to understand her place in it.
With an epic sweep of time and place – traversing Brazil, Turkey, and Portugal – this is a profoundly moving portrait of a young woman finding her way back into life. Brazilian, Turk, woman, daughter, lover – these are the roles that come together, in Levy’s stunning prose, to form a portrait so intimate it is almost universal. Spare, haunting, and evocative, The House in Smyrna is an unforgettable story from one of the most accomplished and original new voices in Brazil.
ISBN: 9781925106411
Pages: 160