The Double Life of Liliane
-
-
3.0 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
This National Book Award–winning author’s autobiographical novel is a “layered portrait of a family and the historical eras it lived through” (The Boston Globe).
“Tuck is a genius.” —Los Angeles Book Review
Her father is a German movie producer who lives in Italy. Her mother is a beautiful, artistically talented woman who resides in New York. As their child, Liliane’s life is divided between those two very different worlds—worlds that inspire her to find herself in both the present and in her ancestors’ pasts.
A shy and observant only child with a vivid imagination, Liliane finds herself exploring her family’s vibrant history—which includes such renowned and diverse figures as the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the tragic Mary Queen of Scots—and piecing together their vivid lives. And in doing so, what is revealed is an astonishing and riveting exploration of self, humanity, and family.
Told with Lily Tuck’s inimitable elegance and peppered with documents, photos, and a rich and varied array of characters, “this autobiographical novel creates a portrait of the writer as a young woman” (The New Yorker).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
National Book Award winner Tuck (The News from Paraguay) blends history, biography, memoir, and fiction in this gleefully chaotic metanarrative, which closely parallels the author's own life. Tracking the emotional and intellectual development of its protagonist, Liliane, who is born in France in the 1930s but raised largely in the U.S., the novel encompasses many of the early 20th century's most monumental and most horrific developments. Sections centering on Liliane's parents and family members offer insights into the tribulations faced by European Jews during World War II, as well as the experiences of migrants to the U.S. in the years during and after the war. Along the way, the novel, restless and roving, delivers reports on Liliane's impressive family history (celebrity relatives include Moses Mendelssohn and Mary, Queen of Scots), while mapping the various places her peripatetic clan has called home (Peru, Italy, and Tanzania among others). While stretches of the novel verge on seeming crammed and distracted, Tuck succeeds in balancing the bounty of the information she relays with playful, buoyant prose and poignant scenes particularly those between Liliane and her mother, Ir ne that quicken the heart. Of her mother's scent, Liliane thinks at one point, "Joy, the most expensive perfume in the world; an ounce consists of ten thousand jasmine flowers and three hundred roses." In Tuck's prose messy, lively, dizzy, happy one gets a contagious sense of fun that she has transmuting life into words.
