cover image Once I Lived

Once I Lived

Natascha Wodin. Serpent's Tail, $14.99 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-85242-221-9

Conceived as a letter written by a Russian emigre to her unborn chilermany. In a series of fragmented, dreamlike reminiscences scattered throughout the novel, the narrator resurrects her memories of every conceivable horror: her family's flight from famine-torn Ukraine at the end of WW II, her mother's haunting silences and mysterious suicide by drowning, her father's physical and emotional abuse, her subsequent life as a runaway, and her desperate adolescent bid for acceptance in a culture increasingly preoccupied with blue jeans, high heels and the outward trappings of success. Wodin, whose first novel, The Interpreter, was awarded the Hermann Hesse Prize, deftly avoids over-dramatizing her tale. The novel's significant strengths lie in the narrator's remarkable voice, which steadfastedly rejects the easy allure of self-pity and victimization. Her measured assessment of her father's cruelty, the rigidity of Germany's social castes and her eternal status as an alien and a foreigner transcends the melodramatic details to become a dignified, thoughtful meditation on the nature of the outsider and the tyranny of language. (June)