Deviation
Description
<em>'Sometimes when you go astray and touch bottom, you finally come out on the other side'</em>
Lucie was brought up by bourgeois parents as a passionate young fascist. At the age of eighteen, the headstrong protagonist decides to volunteer in the Nazi labour camps in Germany. Wishing to disprove what she sees as the lies that are being told about Nazi-Fascism, she instead encounters the horrors of life there - and is changed completely. Shedding her identity, she joins a group of deportees being sent to Dachau concentration camp.
She escapes the camp in October 1944, and wanders around a Germany devastated by allied bombardments. Then, in February 1945, while helping dig in rubble seeking to rescue survivors, a wall falls on her and she is left paralysed from the waist down.
Translated into English for the first time, <i>Deviation</i> is an autobiographical novel about the repression of memory, and one woman's attempt to make sense of the hell she has lived through.
Reviews / Votes
Raises vital questions about the paralysing effects of the belief systems people hold and how hard it can be to break free of them... could hardly be more relevant * Financial Times * Strange and compelling -- Lucy Hughes-Hallett * Guardian * At its heart is the narrator's rebellion against her bourgeois upbringing and her struggle to live an authentic life according to her own rules * New Internationalist Magazine * A powerful autobiography about a young woman's search for the truth and how she came to terms with it * Cub Magazine * A disturbing, and yet brilliantly ambiguous exploration of humanity's darkest time * Booklist * Luce D'Eramo's extraordinary novel Deviation, a bestseller in Italy when published in 1979 but only now available in English... is, as its title may imply, a rejection of the idea that literary form can be neatly separated from psychic and political life * Harper's Magazine * The harshest, most in-depth account of the Nazi experience, the most uncompromising and courageous * Goliarda Sapienza * A remarkable and highly unusual contribution to the literature of the Nazi concentration camps... A searing moral journey towards conscience... written with verve and a deep lucidity * Robert S. C. Gordon, author of The Holocaust in Italian Culture *More details
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