Distant Fathers

Jarre was always an outsider: raised speaking German in Latvia, where her Jewish father was killed by the Nazis in 1941, she learned Italian after she moved to her mother's country but spoke French at home within their minority religious community of Waldensians. And from this memoir, which came out in Italian in 1987 but was just translated into English this year, you feel as though she even felt an outsider to herself and her own history, which she holds and examines at arm's-length distance in a brilliant style that might remind you of Phinney favorite Annie Ernaux. She doesn't trust her own memories, but she knows they are all she has. She turns them over in her mind, and from sentence to sentence you have no idea where she will turn next, and you feel that she doesn’t either. It's quite thrilling.