'It sounds dreadful,' I said to him one day. 'But actually the war is the best thing that ever happened to me.' Helena's mother always said she was a born poetess. It was not a compliment. Now an old woman, Helena looks back on her life and tries to capture the past, filling notebook after notebook with memories of her respectable, rigid upbringing, her unyielding mother, her loyal father, her golden-haired brother. She remembers how, at their uncle's country house in the summer of 1914, their stately bourgeois life of good manners, white linen and afternoon tea collapsed into ruins. And how, with war, came a kind of liberation amidst the mud and rubble-and the appearance of a young English photographer who transformed her existence. Lyrical and tender, filled with images of blazing intensity, While the Gods Were Sleeping asks how it is possible to record the dislocation of war; to describe the indescribable. It is a breathtaking novel about the act of remembering, how the past seeps into our lives and how those we have lost leave their trace in the present.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Pushkin Press
ISBN-13
9781782270171
eBay Product ID (ePID)
209621458
Product Key Features
Book Title
While the Gods Were Sleeping
Author
Erwin Mortier
Format
Hardcover
Language
English
Topic
Books
Publication Year
2014
Number of Pages
368 Pages
Dimensions
Item Height
216mm
Item Width
135mm
Additional Product Features
Title_Author
Erwin Mortier
Country/Region of Manufacture
United Kingdom
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