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Our Voices

Diana Radovan

4.9/5 (19320 ratings)

Description:A woman in search of herself keeps on turning the kaleidoscope that is memory and life, searching for belonging and purpose, echoing into both past and future in a lyrical, deeply personal confession. Our Voices is a melancholic personal narration of what happened in a given time and place to a young girl and her father in an oppressive system and how their story was carried to the next generation. It is also a warning of what could happen to anyone, anywhere, as well as a scream of indignation against social and political injustice, gender constraints, and historical erasure. Last but not least, it is a book of hope – the hope of integrating familial, historical, and social trauma into a bigger self, through language and nature. Through personal storytelling, including a child perspective, terse poetry, myths, fairy-tales, imagery, social and political criticism, as well as some utopias/manifestos, Our Voices is an overcoming of the persistent horrors of communism and immigration; a book about living in the in-betweens and dreaming ourselves into more than mere survival; an invitation to its readers to bring out their own buried “shameful” family stories, to let them breathe and find resonance in the bigger world. 5-star Readers' Favorite Review:"Our Voices is a work of non-fiction in the memoir subgenre. It is aimed at mature readers and was penned by author Diana Radovan. The book follows the author's experiences as an immigrant, surviving the crushing pressures of expectations from society, and living with intergenerational trauma. By moving through the different stories, trains of thought, and even writing styles, the book paints a mosaic of the author's life as fragmented and often confusing as a lived life usually is. With a focus on the hope that the difficulties of the previous generation can avoid being inherited, the book tells a powerful story about a life filled with challenges.This was a simply beautiful reflection on the ups and downs of an eventful life, told through a medley of techniques and styles that each feel disparate at first but soon start coming together to form the picture of a long and emotional journey. Author Diana Radovan’s experiences are laid bare for readers with a candid openness that made me feel as if I was sitting with a dear friend discussing their life over a warm drink, the wider world put to one side as she shared her hard-fought wisdom and insight. There is a messiness to even the most orderly of lives, and I’ve never read a memoir that embraces this messiness whilst producing such exquisite meaning from it as Our Voices. I am sincerely grateful to the author not just for sharing her life with me as a reader but for the wonderful literary gift she uses to bring her story into focus for a stranger."Kirkus Reviews:"Radovan’s debut family memoir explores intergenerational trauma against the backdrop of postwar Romania.At the time of the Romanian Revolution in 1989, the author was a 7-year-old, red-tie–wearing detachment commander of her elementary school’s Communist youth organization. One day, the photograph of the president that hung in the classroom—before which the young author had led her classmates in the national anthem—had been replaced by a picture of the Virgin Mary, and the reality of their previous existence soon became clear: “I hadn’t known we needed help; that we were poor; that our president was an evil dictator,” writes Radovan. “I thought he was our loving father. I thought we were the richest country in the world.” In this book, Radovan, a writer and educator, shares stories from both sides of the divide—the Romania under Communist rule and the one that came after—drawing not only on her own memories, but on those of her mother, Mia, whose life was split between Communist and post-Communist governance, and her grandfather Iuliu, a political dissident who died shortly after being released from a Communist prison. Using diary entries, poems, photographs, and essays, the author cobbles together a family history out of fragments, effectively reflecting the shattered nature of lives under and after authoritarianism. Radovan’s writing has a lyrical quality throughout, whether it takes the form of poetry or prose, offering readers an incantatory blend of the remembered, the overheard, and the imagined: “I imagine my mother as a child, sitting at a desk, reading the books that I will later discover in our home library, all the books that the censors had failed to ban. I imagine her, my aunt, my grandmother, sitting around the kitchen table, at the dim light of the oil lamp, during electricity cuts.” The variation in structure and voice makes for an engaging read throughout even if the overall narrative sometimes feels ephemeral. It’s an impressionistic work but one that manages to communicate the sting of oppression and loss.A chimeric remembrance that delves into the legacy of Romania’s troubled past."We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with Our Voices. To get started finding Our Voices, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

Pages: 272

Format: PDF, EPUB & Kindle Edition

Publisher: Troubador

Release: 2022

ISBN: 1803130733

Description: A woman in search of herself keeps on turning the kaleidoscope that is memory and life, searching for belonging and purpose, echoing into both past and future in a lyrical, deeply personal confession. Our Voices is a melancholic personal narration of what happened in a given time and place to a young girl and her father in an oppressive system and how their story was carried to the next generation. It is also a warning of what could happen to anyone, anywhere, as well as a scream of indignation against social and political injustice, gender constraints, and historical erasure. Last but not least, it is a book of hope – the hope of integrating familial, historical, and social trauma into a bigger self, through language and nature. Through personal storytelling, including a child perspective, terse poetry, myths, fairy-tales, imagery, social and political criticism, as well as some utopias/manifestos, Our Voices is an overcoming of the persistent horrors of communism and immigration; a book about living in the in-betweens and dreaming ourselves into more than mere survival; an invitation to its readers to bring out their own buried “shameful” family stories, to let them breathe and find resonance in the bigger world. 5-star Readers' Favorite Review:"Our Voices is a work of non-fiction in the memoir subgenre. It is aimed at mature readers and was penned by author Diana Radovan. The book follows the author's experiences as an immigrant, surviving the crushing pressures of expectations from society, and living with intergenerational trauma. By moving through the different stories, trains of thought, and even writing styles, the book paints a mosaic of the author's life as fragmented and often confusing as a lived life usually is. With a focus on the hope that the difficulties of the previous generation can avoid being inherited, the book tells a powerful story about a life filled with challenges.This was a simply beautiful reflection on the ups and downs of an eventful life, told through a medley of techniques and styles that each feel disparate at first but soon start coming together to form the picture of a long and emotional journey. Author Diana Radovan’s experiences are laid bare for readers with a candid openness that made me feel as if I was sitting with a dear friend discussing their life over a warm drink, the wider world put to one side as she shared her hard-fought wisdom and insight. There is a messiness to even the most orderly of lives, and I’ve never read a memoir that embraces this messiness whilst producing such exquisite meaning from it as Our Voices. I am sincerely grateful to the author not just for sharing her life with me as a reader but for the wonderful literary gift she uses to bring her story into focus for a stranger."Kirkus Reviews:"Radovan’s debut family memoir explores intergenerational trauma against the backdrop of postwar Romania.At the time of the Romanian Revolution in 1989, the author was a 7-year-old, red-tie–wearing detachment commander of her elementary school’s Communist youth organization. One day, the photograph of the president that hung in the classroom—before which the young author had led her classmates in the national anthem—had been replaced by a picture of the Virgin Mary, and the reality of their previous existence soon became clear: “I hadn’t known we needed help; that we were poor; that our president was an evil dictator,” writes Radovan. “I thought he was our loving father. I thought we were the richest country in the world.” In this book, Radovan, a writer and educator, shares stories from both sides of the divide—the Romania under Communist rule and the one that came after—drawing not only on her own memories, but on those of her mother, Mia, whose life was split between Communist and post-Communist governance, and her grandfather Iuliu, a political dissident who died shortly after being released from a Communist prison. Using diary entries, poems, photographs, and essays, the author cobbles together a family history out of fragments, effectively reflecting the shattered nature of lives under and after authoritarianism. Radovan’s writing has a lyrical quality throughout, whether it takes the form of poetry or prose, offering readers an incantatory blend of the remembered, the overheard, and the imagined: “I imagine my mother as a child, sitting at a desk, reading the books that I will later discover in our home library, all the books that the censors had failed to ban. I imagine her, my aunt, my grandmother, sitting around the kitchen table, at the dim light of the oil lamp, during electricity cuts.” The variation in structure and voice makes for an engaging read throughout even if the overall narrative sometimes feels ephemeral. It’s an impressionistic work but one that manages to communicate the sting of oppression and loss.A chimeric remembrance that delves into the legacy of Romania’s troubled past."We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with Our Voices. To get started finding Our Voices, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

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Our Voices

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