Radiant Daughter

ISBN-13: 9780810151994 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 300 str.

Patricia Grossman

Opis

In Radiant Daughter, award-winning novelist Patricia Grossman follows a Czech-American family for twenty-seven years, beginning in suburban Chicago in 1969 and ending in Brooklyn, in seaside Little Odessa, in 1996. Though the novel begins as a traditional assimilation story immigrant parents, native children, and the conflicts one might expect it evolves into a highly particular and harrowing tale surrounding the descent of Elise Blazek, the family s brightest star. Radiant Daughter is also a story of translation between generations, from the Czech of Irena and Stepan, to the American of the children, and finally to the Russian that is Elise s academic specialty. Radiant Daughter explores all that is human, from the most self- destructive behavior to the highest forms of commitment and self- sacrifice. Even at her lowest moments, Irena never loses her fierce love for the daughter who has traveled so utterly beyond her reach. For Elise, the future will always be complicated: a precarious balance between periods of insight, bursts of accomplishment, and the abyss of her illness. Reminiscent, on the one hand, of the meticulously constructed mother-daughter dynamic in Carol Shields s Unless and, on the other, of the anarchic real-life experience of Big and Little Edie Beale in Grey Gardens, Grossman s moving narrative breaks new ground in exploring a dangerous turn in the complex bond between a mother and her adult child."