Leaving: nueva novela de Sergio Waisman (editorial InteliBooks de Oakland, California).
“Excelente primera novela. Sergio Waisman sabe seguir los rastros de Borges. Cuenta la relación con sus dos lenguas y sus dos culturas como si fuera una novela familiar”.
— Ricardo PigliaWritten in a variety of styles and voices, presented through intersecting plotlines and discontinuous chronologies, Leaving recounts the narratives of migration of a Jewish family, from Poland to Argentina to the U.S. The novel revolves around a young man, inheritor of previous migrations, and his efforts to forge a new beginning—in English—without forgetting that his memories and his family stories remain in Spanish.
Additional information, or to purchase a copy: www.intelibooks.com
About the book:
Leaving is a unique novel, as it tells the stories of the family at its center, while exploring broader themes of memory, language and translation in issues of identity and cross-cultural communication. Latin American identity takes on specific aspects in this novel, with respect not only to Argentine culture, but also to the manifestations of that Jewish Argentine culture once the main characters in the novel have to leave Argentina and move to the United States after the military coup of 1976. In addition, the novel’s very style and structure (an experimental, fragmented collection of interconnected narratives) seeks to mirror the difficulty in recounting and understanding past events, especially as they are distorted by conflicting versions of history and the uncertainty of memory itself, as well as by the changes in languages associated with each “leaving.”
The novel is written primarily in English, with some Spanish throughout; there is also one brief section that is entirely in Spanish, and is purposefully left untranslated.
About the author:
Sergio Waisman was born in New York to Argentine parents in 1967. He is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at The George Washington University. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has translated four books by Latin American authors, receiving an NEA Translation Fellowship Award in 2000 for his translation of The Absent City by Ricardo Piglia. Sergio Waisman is also the author of Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery (Bucknell University Press). Leaving is Sergio Waisman’s first novel.
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This page last updated
01/07/2005
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ISSN 1668-1002 / info