My Mother’s Tears
My Mother’s Tears
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With subtle, bemused humour and an unerring eye for human frailty, Michel Layaz writes about the hidden tensions within families, the awkwardness of adolescence, and the drama of intimacy between friends and lovers. His fifth novel, My Mother’s Tears, is his most poignant yet.
The adult narrator of My Mother’s Tears has returned to clean out his childhood home after his mother’s death. In thirty short chapters, each focused on a talismanic object or resonant episode from his childhood, the narrator tries to solve the mystery behind the flood of tears with which his strikingly beautiful, intelligent, and inscrutable mother greeted his birth. Like insects preserved in amber, these objects—an artificial orchid, a statue, a pair of green pumps, a steak knife, a fishing rod and reel, among others—are surrounded by an aura that permeates the narrator’s life. Interspersed with these chapters are fragments from the narrator’s conversation with his present lover, a woman who demands that he verbally confront his past. This difficult conversation charts his gradual liberation from the psychological wounds he suffered growing up.
Not only an account of a son’s attempt to understand his enigmatic mother, My Mother’s Tears is also a moving novel about language and memory that explores the ambivalent power of words to hurt and to heal, to revive the past and to put childhood demons to rest.
Praise for the French original:
‘As Michel Leiris did in Manhood, [Layaz] recreates a primary mythology that not only marked the narrator’s childhood but also shapes his present life. At the center of this mythology, the simultaneously castrating and loving figure of his mother is revived through writing that is cruel, taut, and precise and that rarely misses its mark. With its ferocity and its secret music, Layaz’s novel releases phantoms that will haunt readers for a long time.’—Scène Magazine
- ISBN: 9780857426529
- Pages: 192
- Size (inches): 5 x 8
- Format: Hardback
- Publication Year: 2019
- Series: The Swiss List
- Category: Fiction
If you are ordering from India, your order will be shipped from Seagull Books, Calcutta. Shipping is free for orders above ₹999.
If you are ordering from the US or the UK or anywhere else in the world, your order will be shipped from the University of Chicago Press' distribution centre, Chicago.
Please note: For customers paying in currencies other than Indian rupee or US dollar, prices will be calculated according to the currency conversion rate at the time of purchase and may vary from the printed price.
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Seagull Books (estd 1982) has been crafting books with an eye to both exceptional content and radical design. What began highly risky business of publishing books-books on alternative cinema, philosophy, culture-continues to be a passionately felt need of the hour: manuscripts that need to see the light of day, instinctive and theatre, visual arts, to reach a readership, to stimulate minds, to change outlooks. Read More
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