Translated from Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth
ISBN: 978-1-912545-377
‘Jonah and his Daughter’ is the tale of the tale of the 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 last is the mother of twins in our own time. A colourful, variegated tapestry of arborescent tales within tales, which interweaves myth, 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.
“The book is multi-layered, and every reader will find something different. On one level, it is a tale as rich as the Iliad, which you read slowly and miss when it ends. On another, it is a study of a personality whose path is shaped by an inner voice, and the way in which this affects the lives of those who love him.”
Fiona Hook, Church Times
“Pârvulescu builds a novel from that Biblical fable, adding characters, expanding dramatic events, and humanizing the main character by exploring his faults as he works through the conflicts that build to his ultimate crisis.
She could have left it at that, and have given us a perfectly fine novel. Pârvulescu, however, gives contemporary readers a second story—that of the story itself as it evolves in its passing from grandmother and mother to daughter (each daughter hears the story twice) through nearly one hundred generations.”
Rick Henry, Rain Taxi
