Diary of the Fall
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
‘I often dreamed about the moment of the fall, a silence that lasted a second, possibly two, a room full of sixty people and no one making a sound, as if everyone were waiting for my classmate to cry out ... but he lay on the ground with his eyes closed’
A schoolboy prank goes horribly wrong, and a thirteen-year-old boy is left injured. Years later, one of the classmates relives the episode as he tries to come to terms with his demons.
Diary of the Fall is the story of three generations: a man examining the mistakes of his past, and his struggle for forgiveness; a father with Alzheimer’s, for whom recording every memory has become an obsession; and a grandfather who survived Auschwitz, filling notebook after notebook with the false memories of someone desperate to forget.
Beautiful and brave, Michel Laub’s novel asks the most basic – and yet most complex – questions about history and identity, exploring what stories we choose to tell about ourselves and how we become the people we are.
Michel Laub's next book, A Poison Apple, will be published on 6th July 2017.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As much a novella as a novel, and as much a meditation as a novella, Laub's first book published in English probes the emotional and psychological legacy a Jewish son inherits from his father and grandfather. In overlapping reminiscences, notes, and diary entries, a 40-something Brazilian journalist/writer recalls what he knows about his grandfather, an Auschwitz survivor unwaveringly uncommunicative about his concentration camp days. Before his death, the grandfather writes a memoir that fails to mention Auschwitz and characterizes the boardinghouse where he contracted typhoid while a newly arrived immigrant as clean and cozy. While sorting through his grandfather's fabrications and discernible facts, the journalist also remembers his father, who built a comfortable and privileged life for his family and frequently expressed hatred for the Nazis and anti-Semitism. An account of his own teenage rebellion is further interlaced with his grandfather's and father's stories, beginning with the prank that injured a fellow student, a poor gentile bullied by his Jewish classmates. An evocation of his unhappy schooldays, when he learned both what it means to be persecuted and what it means to persecute, is followed by contemplation on the alcoholism and marital failure of his later year. A turning point comes when he receives news that his father has Alzheimer's, which will soon rob the old man of all memory. Laub's literary tricks include storytelling through negatives (what the grandfather doesn't say reveals more than what he says); naming only two characters (the fictional boy Jo o; the historical Primo Levi); and recurring motifs (Auschwitz, falls, hospitals, fathers and sons); deployed in concert, they deliver an introspective riff on the "non-viability of human experience."
