Listen: A MemoirPoetic and haunting, Listen is an artfully rendered memoir that recounts the author's relationship with her brilliant and abusive father. Listen is a memoir of voices, the voices of parents that linger in the ears of children until the day when those children are able to sound their own note. A domineering father and a professor of languages and literature in the 1950s and 60s, Victor has four women trapped in his orbit his long-suffering wife and his three well-behaved daughters. "Teacher, poet, translator" is how he wants his gravestone to read, and in life he is dedicated to passing on to his family the great cultural achievements of western civilization poetry, philosophy, religion, music, art. But he leaves darker gifts as well, in particular to his daughter Wendy the most traumatic legacy of all: incest. A major achievement and a stunning debut, Listen is about how families shape their memories and how even things that are never spoken about have potent echoes. It's also a memoir that chronicles a poet's apprenticeship to words, the story of a daughter who listened and who, with the gift for poetry her father gave her, learned to translate the darkest secrets of their past. |
Contents
Section 1 | 1 |
Section 2 | 7 |
Section 3 | 11 |
Section 4 | 12 |
Section 5 | 22 |
Section 6 | 29 |
Section 7 | 38 |
Section 8 | 42 |
Section 21 | 109 |
Section 22 | 114 |
Section 23 | 121 |
Section 24 | 138 |
Section 25 | 140 |
Section 26 | 143 |
Section 27 | 149 |
Section 28 | 156 |
Section 9 | 43 |
Section 10 | 52 |
Section 11 | 67 |
Section 12 | 70 |
Section 13 | 71 |
Section 14 | 77 |
Section 15 | 80 |
Section 16 | 94 |
Section 17 | 95 |
Section 18 | 99 |
Section 19 | 101 |
Section 20 | 108 |
Section 29 | 159 |
Section 30 | 161 |
Section 31 | 171 |
Section 32 | 173 |
Section 33 | 205 |
Section 34 | 242 |
Section 35 | 245 |
Section 36 | 247 |
Section 37 | 248 |
Section 38 | 249 |