About this item
A young woman moves across an ocean to uncover the truth about her grandparents' mysterious estrangement and pieces together the extraordinary story of their wartime experiences In 1948, after surviving World War II by escaping Nazi-occupied France for refugee camps in Switzerland, the author's grandparents, Anna and Armand, bought an old stone house in a remote, picturesque village in the South of France. Five years later, Anna packed her bags and walked out on Armand, taking the typewriter and their children. Aside from one brief encounter, the two never saw or spoke to each other again, never remarried, and never revealed what had divided them forever.A Fifty-Year Silence is the deeply involving account of Miranda Richmond Mouillot's journey to find out what happened between her grandmother, a physician, and her grandfather, an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials, who refused to utter his wife's name aloud after she left him. To discover the roots of their embittered and entrenched silence, Miranda abandons her plans for the future and moves to their stone house, now a crumbling ruin; immerses herself in letters, archival materials, and secondary sources; and teases stories out of her reticent, and declining, grandparents. As she reconstructs how Anna and Armand braved overwhelming odds and how the knowledge her grandfather acquired at Nuremberg destroyed their relationship, Miranda wrestles with the legacy of trauma, the burden of history, and the complexities of memory. She also finds herself learning how not only to survive but to thrive - making a home in the village and falling in love.With warmth, humor, and rich, evocative details that bring her grandparents' outsize characters and their daily struggles vividly to life, A Fifty-Year Silence is a heartbreaking, uplifting love story spanning two continents and three generations.From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
I was born and raised in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in Asheville, NC, also known as the Paris of the South and the Freak Capital of the Nation, depending on who you ask. I came into this world intolerant of all things institutional, quit school twice, and spent a year in a mournful and drafty boarding house in Switzerland, but ultimately managed to graduate from Asheville High School and then from Harvard College, where I studied History and Literature. I moved to France in 2004 to write A Fifty-Year Silence, intending to stay just a year, but I got sidetracked by the writing process and here I still am. Nowadays I divide my time between France and Australia, with occasional side trips to the United States. I write mostly nonfiction, my own mix of history and personal reflections, and I translate from French into English. Most recently, I completed a translation of Romain Gary's last (and in my opinion greatest) novel, THE KITES, which is forthcoming from New Directions in 2017. My next writing project is about brilliance, femininity, and the Enlightenment's only woman philosophe, and my next translation project is Johann Chapoutot's brilliant examination of Nazism, titled THE LAW OF BLOOD, for Harvard University Press.
