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Tobias Hecht - After Life: An Ethnographic Novel - 9780822337881 - V9780822337881
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After Life: An Ethnographic Novel

€ 39.93
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Description for After Life: An Ethnographic Novel Paperback. With truth impossible to disentangle from invention, Tobias Hecht followed the lead of Verissimo, his would-be informant, creating characters, rendering a tale that didn't happen but that might have, probing at what it means to translate a life into words. This book is a tribute to and reinterpretation of the Latin American testimonio genre. Num Pages: 192 pages, 17 b&w photos. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 233 x 155 x 12. Weight in Grams: 290.
Bruna VerÍssimo, a youth from the hardscrabble streets of Recife, in Northeast Brazil, spoke with Tobias Hecht over the course of many years, reliving her early childhood in a raging and destitute home, her initiation into the world of prostitution at a time when her contemporaries had scarcely started school, and her coming of age against all odds.

Hecht had originally intended to write a biography of VerÍssimo. But with interviews ultimately spanning a decade, he couldn't ignore that much of what he had been told wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. In VerÍssimo’s recounting of her life, a sister who had never been born died tragically, while the very same rape that shattered the body and mind of an acquaintance occurred a second time, only with a different victim and several years later. At night, with the anthropologist’s tape recorder in hand, she became her own ethnographer, inventing informants, interviewing herself, and answering in distinct voices.

With truth impossible to disentangle from invention, Hecht followed the lead of VerÍssimo, his would-be informant, creating characters, rendering a tale that didn’t happen but that might have, probing at what it means to translate a life into words.

A call and response of truth and invention, mental illness and yearning, After Life is a tribute to and reinterpretation of the Latin American testimonio genre. Desire, melancholy, longing, regret, and the hunger to live beyond the confines of past and future meet in this debut novel by Tobias Hecht.

Product Details

Format
Paperback
Publication date
2006
Publisher
Duke University Press United States
Number of pages
192
Condition
New
Number of Pages
277
Place of Publication
North Carolina, United States
ISBN
9780822337881
SKU
V9780822337881
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1

About Tobias Hecht
Tobias Hecht is a writer living in Claremont, California. His first book, At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil, won the 2002 Margaret Mead Award. Hecht is the editor of Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society and the translator of The Museum of Useless Efforts, by Cristina Peri Rossi. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University.

Reviews for After Life: An Ethnographic Novel
“After Life is not only deeply moving, but written with profound integrity. It is saturated with compassion and in this lies its intense moral power.”-Anne Michaels, author of Fugitive Pieces “A disturbingly powerful journey into the violence of everyday life and the inner world of literature. The enigmatic and courageous characters of After Life jump off the page and change the ways we think about human agency today.”-JoÃo Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment “After Life engages a startling mix of ethnography and fiction to illuminate both the world of Recife’s homeless and the peculiar ennui that often befalls the anthropologist during extended fieldwork. . . . Remarkable. . . . After Life urges us to consider, more deeply than we have before, alternative modes of representation.” - Robin E. Sheriff (Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology) “A call and response of truth and invention, mental illness and yearning, After Life is a tribute to and reinterpretation of the Latin American testimonio genre. Desire, melancholy, longing, regret, and the hunger to live beyond the confines of past and future meet in this debut novel by Tobias Hecht.” (Adolescence)

Goodreads reviews for After Life: An Ethnographic Novel