Musicians and Watchmakers

by Alicia Steimberg, Andrea G. Labinger (Translator)

Overview

Told from the perspective of an adolescent girl, this humorous and deceptively intuitive account of a Jewish family living in 1940s Buenos Aires tackles themes of identity and history through a flawlessly rendered colloquial style. Semi-autobiographical and charged with energy to match the young narrator's age, this episodic novel tackles issues of religious belonging, the first sparks of political awareness, budding sexuality, and the complications of an eccentric family.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780935480962
Publisher:	Latin American Literary Review Press
Publication date:	08/28/1998
Series:	Series Discoveries Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Alicia Steimberg is an Argentine author, an educator, and a translator. She was awarded a Fulbright grant to teach at the University of Iowa and has served as the director of books with the Argentine Secretariate of Culture. Andrea G. Labinger is an emerita professor of Spanish at the University of La Verne, where she is a former founding director of the university's honors program. She lives in the Los Angeles area.

Editorial Reviews

"A pungent, semi-autobiographical account of growing up Jewish in Argentina in the 1940s, this small gem of a novel (originally published in Spanish in 1971) is marked by Steimberg's distinctive voice—wittily irreverent, ironic yet warm, at once precocious and worldly-wise. . . . Labinger's translation is a delight, conveying the sights, sounds, misconceptions and dreams of an intensely experienced youth."  —Publishers Weekly

"[The novel] describes in deliciously wry comic accents the experiences of an Argentinian Jewish girl. . . . A delightful book."  —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

This episodic autobiographical novel, first published in 1971, describes in deliciously wry comic accents the experiences of an Argentinian Jewish girl (named "Alicia Steimberg") growing up in Buenos Aires in the 1940s. The formative experiences of dawning sexual awareness, discovery of parental imperfection (in the frightening harangues of Alicia's unstable widowed mother), and wavering devotion to contentious relatives are drolly captured in brief vignettes dominated by such vigorous characters as the narrator's unregenerate socialist grandfather and especially her "naturalistic-vitaministic-anticonstipationist" grandmother, a fractious force of nature who might have been invented by Jorge Amado in collaboration with Sholom Aleichem. A delightful book.

Kirkus Reviews