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Diary of the Fall: A Novel
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Published:
Other Press 2014
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Description
From one of Granta’s Best Young Brazilian Novelists, a literary masterpiece that will break your heart

At the narrator’s elite Jewish school in a posh suburb of Porte Alegre, a cruel prank leaves the only Catholic student there terribly injured. Years later, he relives the episode as he examines the mistakes of his past and struggles for forgiveness. His father, who has Alzheimer’s, obsessively records every memory that comes to mind, and his grandfather, who survived Auschwitz, fills notebook after notebook with the false memories of someone desperate to forget.
This powerful novel centered on guilt and the complicated legacy of history asks provocative questions about what it means to be Jewish in the twenty-first century.
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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
08/26/2014
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781590516522
ASIN:
B00IQQUW58
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Michel Laub. (2014). Diary of the Fall: A Novel. Other Press.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Michel Laub. 2014. Diary of the Fall: A Novel. Other Press.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Michel Laub, Diary of the Fall: A Novel. Other Press, 2014.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Michel Laub. Diary of the Fall: A Novel. Other Press, 2014.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 17:26:55
Date Updated:
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      • role: Author
      • fileAs: Laub, Michel
      • bioText: Michel Laub was born in Porto Alegre and currently lives in Sao Paulo. He is a writer, journalist, and the author of five novels. DIARY OF THE FALL is his first to be published in English, and has won the Brasilia Award and the Bravo!/Bradesco Prize. Michel was named one of Granta's twenty Best Young Brazilian Novelists in 2012.
        Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over twenty-five years and has translated many novels and short stories by Portuguese, Spanish, and Latin American writers, including Javier Marías, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Bernardo Atxaga and Ramón del Valle-Inclán. She has won various prizes for her work, including, in 2008, the PEN Book-of-the-Month Translation Award and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her version of Eça de Queiroz's masterpiece The Maias, and, most recently, the 2011 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Elephant's Journey by José Saramago. She lives in Leicester, England. The author lives in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
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publishDate
2014-08-26T00:00:00-04:00
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title
Diary of the Fall
fullDescription
From one of Granta’s Best Young Brazilian Novelists, a literary masterpiece that will break your heart

At the narrator’s elite Jewish school in a posh suburb of Porte Alegre, a cruel prank leaves the only Catholic student there terribly injured. Years later, he relives the episode as he examines the mistakes of his past and struggles for forgiveness. His father, who has Alzheimer’s, obsessively records every memory that comes to mind, and his grandfather, who survived Auschwitz, fills notebook after notebook with the false memories of someone desperate to forget.
This powerful novel centered on guilt and the complicated legacy of history asks provocative questions about what it means to be Jewish in the twenty-first century.
reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: Myla Goldberg, bestselling author of Bee Season and The False Friend
      • content:

        "Finally, a novel about the relationship between Judaism's past and present that explores new territory instead of adding yet another set of tired footprints to overworked ground. Diary of the Fall is a refreshingly honest and startlingly original book."

      • premium: False
      • source: The Wall Street Journal
      • content: "Margaret Jull Costa's achievement is nothing less than heroic."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Boston Globe
      • content: "Finely wrought."
      • premium: False
      • source: Publishers Weekly
      • content: "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."
      • premium: False
      • source: Kirkus Reviews
      • content: "A spare and meditative story that captures the long aftereffects of tragedy."
      • premium: False
      • source: Justin Alvarez, Paris Review blog
      • content: "Brutal yet delicate...attempts to understand man's basic identity, 'part of a past that is likewise of no importance compared to what I am and will be.'"
      • premium: False
      • source: CounterPunch
      • content: "[A] deeply satisfying novel...Michael Laub's expansive story will haunt you long after you encounter the resolution."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Brooklyn Rail
      • content: "[A] crisply taut novella."
      • premium: False
      • source: Full Stop Magazine
      • content: "[F]ormally experimental but also emotionally moving."
      • premium: False
      • source: Martin Fletcher, author of Walking Israel, winner of the National Jewish Book Award
      • content: "Michel Laub has constructed a painful, relentless and ultimately beautiful portrait of three generations, whose stories, told in parallel, culminate in the most innocent and surprising expression of love. A rewarding and excellent read."
      • premium: False
      • source: Todd Hasak-Lowy, author of The Task of This Translator
      • content: "Beautiful, profound, and masterfully structured....overflows with a lucid, sober, oddly uplifting wisdom. I was humbled by this book, amazed by Michel Laub's ability to shuttle between three generations, to again and again confront the madness of his family's unimaginable past in such a way as to recognize and respond to it in his own unruly present."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Guardian (UK)
      • content: "Michel Laub's Diary of the Fall (translated by Margaret Jull Costa) is a powerful exploration of memory and guilt, drawing connections between a disastrous high-school prank and the Holocaust."
      • premium: False
      • source: Herald (UK)
      • content: "I have already found a contender for my book of 2014."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Independent (UK)
      • content: "A gripping, thoughtful novel, fluidly translated...By focusing on an act of childhood brutality and its mundane consequences, Laub beautifully retrieves the tragedy of the holocaust from its scholarship, politics and deniers, cutting to the bone of human life, its longings and limitations."
      • premium: False
      • source: Bookslut
      • content: "Laub makes an eloquent statement about the human condition, and how we can learn to live despite it."
      • premium: False
      • source: New Statesman (UK)
      • content: "Laub's is a fine, complex piece of writing that examines questions of guilt and responsibility for crimes large and small, and how, if possible, to atone for them."
      • premium: False
      • source: Neel Mukherjee, Literary Review (UK)
      • content: "The remarkable quality of the book resides in its construction....Diary of the Fall's long ribbons of prose create a work of immense incantatory power."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Sun (UK)
      • content: "This riveting read challenges how we choose to tell others our life story and how events make us into the people we are."
      • premium: False
      • source: Irish Times
      • content: "May well emerge as one of the finest novels published in English this year."
      • premium: False
      • source: Irish Examiner
      • content: "Powerful ."
      • premium: False
      • source: NoMínimo
      • content: "An absolutely impeccable writer."
      • premium: False
      • source: Terra Magazine
      • content: "The best Brazilian writer of the new generation."
      • premium: False
      • source: Estado de S. Paulo
      • content: "As with Milton Hatoum, in Michel Laub there is always...a subtle touch at the most dramatic moments."
      • premium: False
      • source: NRC Handelsblad
      • content: "A courageous and staggering novel."
      • premium: False
      • source: De Groene Amsterdammer
      • content: "Even while reading it for the second time, the story held me captive."
      • premium: False
      • source: Het Parool
      • content: "[A] beautiful novel."
      • premium: False
      • source: Bookmunch
      • content: "Diary of the Fall is utterly convincing. It's an original and thought-provoking exploration of the way history casts its ripples through generations."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Northern Echo
      • content: "A powerful novel."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Literary Review

      • content: "A brutally honest reflection on the power that memory holds over us all."
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        June 2, 2014
        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 João; 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.”

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        June 15, 2014
        A childhood prank gone wrong prompts one man's reckoning with his family's Holocaust history in this recursive, astringent novel, the author's first published in English.The narrator of Laub's fifth novel is a middle-aged Brazilian man who's on his third marriage, courting alcoholism and caring for his father, who's just been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. But he's preoccupied as much with the past as the present, particularly his complicity in an incident that occurred when he was 13: He and his friends let a classmate fall to the ground during the last of the traditional "birthday bumps," leaving him badly injured. That moment is the keyhole through which the narrator considers his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, and the emotional weight of the death camps. (The narrator had just been bar mitzvahed when the incident occurred, so his Jewish heritage was top-of-mind.) Grandfather kept a series of notebooks after escaping Auschwitz and moving to Brazil, but the atrocity is absent from its pages, though sublimated into obsessive scribbling about hygiene. This slim study of the difficulty of facing past horrors is mirrored in the cracked quality of the narrative: Each section is splintered into paragraph-long minichapters that offer glimpses of the narrator's fights with his father, his regrets over the bullied and wounded schoolmate, his grandfather's decline and the limitations of Holocaust memoirs. (Primo Levi's If This Is a Man is a particular focus.) The overall mood of the novel is understandably tragic and soaked in regret: The narrator, like his father and grandfather before him, is trying and failing to come to grips with atrocity in his writing. But the closing pages here carry a sense that recovery and forgiveness may be possible, if hard-won.A spare and meditative story that captures the long aftereffects of tragedy.

        COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity
35
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From one of Granta’s Best Young Brazilian Novelists, a literary masterpiece that will break your heart

At the narrator’s elite Jewish school in a posh suburb of Porte Alegre, a cruel prank leaves the only Catholic student there terribly injured. Years later, he relives the episode as he examines the mistakes of his past and struggles for forgiveness. His father, who has Alzheimer’s, obsessively records every memory that comes to mind, and his grandfather, who survived Auschwitz, fills notebook after notebook with the false memories of someone desperate to forget.
This powerful novel centered on guilt and the complicated legacy of history asks provocative questions about what it means to be Jewish in the twenty-first century.
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