Theseus, His New Life
A Novel
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A mesmerizing, poetic autofiction about the quest to find meaning in family tragedies, and a sense of self after loss.
In 2012, Theseus heads east in search of a new life, fleeing the painful memories of his past: the suicide of his older brother, the death of his mother, shortly followed by the death of his father. He takes three boxes of archives, leaving everything in disarray, and boards the last night train with his children. He thinks he’s heading toward the light, toward a reinvention, but the past quickly catches up to him.
With a stunning mix of poetry and prose, Camille de Toledo beautifully captures the conflicting urges to look back at or away from our complex histories, made all the more poignant through the scattered contents of Theseus’s archives—black-and-white photos, fragments of handwritten notes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Grief and aimlessness imbue every page of de Toledo's lyrical if diffuse English-language debut. Protagonist Theseus, spurred by the suicide of his older brother, Jerome, and the deaths of his parents, travels eastward from Paris in 2005, crossing into "what he believes is a new frontier." The narrative moves fluidly back and forth in time as Theseus pieces together his father's family history and its move from Germany to France in the 1930s by reading excerpts of a German ancestor's manuscript. Theseus ends up spending 13 years living in Berlin, where his grief keeps a hold on him, and he takes to writing poetry, which de Toledo weaves in throughout. (In one poem, Theseus calls Berlin "an open-air cemetery haunted by last century's ghosts.") The more Theseus reflects on his parents' stories and on Jerome's death, the more tragic family history emerges from both world wars. It's an evocative experiment, but a lack of clarity on what's happening and how it all fits together blunts the impact. Though flawed, it's worth a look for its elliptical and haunting style.
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