From Life to Life

Code: From Life to Life
Category: Catalogue

by Ioana Parvulescu

Translated from Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth

'From Life to Life' is the tale of the tale of reluctant, recalcitrant prophet Jonah, passed down from mother to daughter over the course of thousands of years, from the eighth century B.C. to the present day, in a sweeping narrative that range from the ancient port of Jaffa in the eastern Mediterranean to the modern-day cities of Prague, Munich, London, Bucharest. The first storyteller is Jonah’s daughter herself, and the latest is the mother of twins in our own time. A colourful, variegated tapestry of arborescent tales within tales, which interweaves myths, legends, family histories, and psychologies, the novel extrapolates a biblical story to meditate on the nature of narrative and the narratorial voice, on permanence and change, on the unfolding of self through storytelling, on the irreducible mystery of the narrated self.