A review by emilyacres
Distant Fathers by Marina Jarre

challenging emotional sad slow-paced

4.0

This is a stunning memoir that is as enriching as it is demanding. Marina Jarre was born in Latvia to a Jewish father and a minority Protestant Italian mother. She spent her early childhood in Latvia before moving to Italy after her parents' divorce only to have her entire father's side of the family killed in the Holocaust. (Though I should say this is very much not a Holocaust nor WWII memoir.) Split into three parts—childhood, adolescence, and adulthood—I find myself particularly taken with how the author writes about time. More specifically how she writes about one's relationship with time at different stages in life. Whereas a child experiences time very much in the present, as reflected in her writing in tense as well as style, as an adolescent Jarre gains a relationship with the past and the passage of time. Though I haven't gotten as far as adulthood I'm very much looking forward to seeing how she chooses to keep representing this theme. ⁣

For a memoir it is very nonlinear, especially in the part about her childhood. Something I'm loving, and don't often see in this genre, is Jarre's ability to remove the distance with which one normally writes about their past. Her thoughts read very much as a child's thoughts instead of an adult impossing their own upon their childhood. It so perfectly encapsulates a child's view of the world. ⁣
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You definitely cannot read this memoir passively, it requires your full attention, but I'm finding it all the more rewarding for it.
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