The Sound of Our Steps
“There were three of them in the shack: the older brother, the older sister and the little girl. The mother was not another person: she was the shack.”
The Sound of Our Steps is the humorous yet heartbreaking story of a “headless family,” written with razor-sharp insight but also great warmth and love. It is a book about home, not-home, and the longing for one. And the home in question is a government-owned tenement on the edge of a rich neighborhood; more precisely, it is a shack in this dilapidated immigrant housing project. Here, the mother Lisette and her three children eke out a miserable living, while the father, obsessed with fighting government discrimation against Mizrahi Jews, only visits from time to time. Set in Israel of the 1950s and 60s, it draws on the author`s memories, as child and as adult, and weaves a fascinating double vantage point.
A winning novel by this well-known author.
- Languages
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English, French, Italian, Turkish
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Italian
Rome, Atmosphere Libri, 2011 -
French
Paris, Stock, 2012 -
English
New York, Metropolitan, 2015 -
Turkish
Istanbul, Yapi Kredi, 2018
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| Title | The Sound of Our Steps |
|---|---|
| Writer's Last Name | Matalon |
| Writer's First Name | Ronit |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Publisher (Hebrew) | Am Oved |
| No. Pages | 424pp. |
| Book title - Hebrew (phonetic) | Kol Tzeʹadeinu |
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“ Amazing!... The power of this book lies both in its rendering of a suffocating family, and in its lyrical, inventive language. ”
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“ After 40 pages, one is sucked into the folly of this family united by deprivation, isolation and the memories of another life… Magnificently translated by Rosie Pinhas-Delpuech. ”
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“ The experience of exile, which lies at the heart of this novel, is magnificently transcended. Matalon's writing is demanding, elegant, resolutely impure, entirely tuned in to the Hebrew of today... Tremendously sensitive and humorous, [yet] deeply melancholic, this is one of the great books about exile. ”