Welcome to Litsy!

This is the author‘s debut published in 1995. It‘s published as a novel but feels like it has to be a memoir. A section on the character‘s father, one on the mother, one on the experience of ballet dancers, and one on falling for a married Russian immigrant. As I was reading it I thought the writing was too simple, but by the end I realized how impactful the descriptions were and how close I felt to the characters. #10BeforetheEnd #offtheshelf

I never saw my father read, except for the newspaper. He did not read the Reader's Digests that he saved. He would not have been able to read The Good Earth. I am sure he could not write with fluency in any tongue. The older I grew the more I thought of him as illiterate. Hard for me to accept the fact that he did not read books. Say I grew up to be a writer. He would not read what I wrote.

I‘ve been wanting to read more by Sigrid Nunez ever since reading and loving The Friend. A Feather on the Breath of God is her first novel, published in 1995. It‘s the story of a young woman looking back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese Panamanian father and a German mother. #currentlyreading #fridayreads #sigridnunez

I really liked The Friend, which won the US National Book Award in 2018 and wanted to read more from the author. This book, her first, published in 1995, is positioned as a novel, but given the author‘s own heritage, it definitely has an autobiographical/auto-fiction feel. The part about studying ballet is one of the best I‘ve ever read.