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3.85 AVERAGE
3.85 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
This book is a tour-de-force--poetic, insightful, moving. It is also too long and sometimes tiresome and boring. But when it shines, it rocks your world. The reflections on history and memory, on the artifacts that belonged to those now dead and what they mean, on how we search for ourselves as we search for our family history, on living and dying, and what we owe to both groups--just amazing, beautiful, and penetrating. Stepanova's book is part memoir, part family history, but also (and the best part) reflections on life, death, history, and memory. Along the way she makes excellent use of an inspiring group of authors and scholars, from Sontag to Nabokov, to Marianne Hirsch (The Generation of Postmemory), Primo Levi, Jacques Ranciere, Tsvetan Todorov, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, W.G. Sebald, and many more. Historians and memoirists should all read this. "The past lies before us, like a huge planet waiting to be colonized: first the raiding parties, and then the slow modification process."
challenging
informative
reflective
tense
slow-paced
slow-paced
A reviewer has already called this "an instant classic," and I agree. I also agree with many reviewers that it's very difficult to categorize this book - it has elements of family history, meditation on memory and the past, a reckoning with Russia's dark history, and literary/academic essay. The latter category holds especially true in the second part/middle section of the book, in which Maria Stepanova uses family photographs (never shown, with one exception, throughout the book) and memories as starting points to examine history, literature, and philosophy. Throughout, the book pokes at the 'sacred cows' of memory on both national and personal levels. Otherwise, the stories of her family members and ancestors illustrate and complicate the grand narratives of Russian and Soviet twentieth-century history, while Stepanova sifts through the evidence with an eye to silence, complexity, and contradiction. Sasha Dugdale, who has also translated Stepanova's poetry into English, has done an incredible job with translating this work. I highly recommend, especially for memory and heritage scholars or enthusiasts.
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
super challenging read in that it took me a year to finish (taking into account time constraints, external commitments, etc) but maria stepanova’s writing style is genuinely so beautiful (subject to translation of course) and the way she writes about her family and memory and her reflections of death and remembering are timeless and put feelings i had into words. there are lots of really great quotes that i’ve highlighted. it’s difficult to write a review that encapsulates this book bc there are so many different essays with different subjects but i loved how the whole thing was a recollection of history and memory in every sense of both words, in that it recalled deeply personal memories and history in communal and wider sociopolitical contexts. i guess in a sense it’s both scary and reassuring that our lives are small cogs in a universe-sized machine, but are no less filled with meaning.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Ett verktyg för att hjälpa oss minna tidigare generationer.
challenging
reflective
medium-paced