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fromwww.theguardian.com
1 week agoOn Memoir by Blake Morrison review lessons in life writing from a master
Life writing encompasses personal and collective experiences, requiring careful navigation of emotions and events.
Dilara, the protagonist of this début novel, is consumed by the absence of a stable home in her life. She and her family flee Turkey, where she is from, after a failed coup in 2016. When they end up in Italy, something inexplicable happens: Dilara's bathroom transforms into a cell in an infamous prison on the outskirts of Istanbul.
As he did in his masterful Flaubert's Parrot, the British author returns in this new work to a hybrid style that blends fiction and nonfiction, imagination and erudition. And once again he plays with the traps of the past and memory, as he did in The Sense of an Ending, which won the Booker Prize in 2011. In Departures, a couple, Stephen and Jean, attempt without much success to rekindle their idealized university romance half a century later.