Showing results by author "Maria Stepanova" in All Categories

With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a poetic voice.

The writer known as M. is living in exile while her home country wages war on a neighbouring state. Wracked by shame and severed from her language, M. finds herself unable to write, unmoored in a present where the future feels unknowable. When she travels to a nearby country for an event, a twist of fate leaves her stranded in an unfamiliar city, phoneless and untraceable. In this rupture, she feels a flicker of liberation – the possibility of starting over – but memories of childhood, books, films and tarot cards pull her back, the last fragments of a vanishing world.

Desde que su país natal declarara la guerra a un Estado vecino, M. vive en la ciudad de B., exiliada y en una suerte de limbo, aislada de su hogar y su lengua materna, incapaz de escribir. Sin embargo, durante un viaje al extranjero con motivo de un festival literario, cuando acaba varada en una ciudad desconocida sin manera de contactar con nadie, en lugar de perdida se siente liberada: al fin libre de toda raigambre, lo único que desea es dejar atrás no sólo su vida anterior, sino también la propia identidad, para desaparecer.