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A review by littoral
Homesick by Jennifer Croft
3.0
Jennifer Croft is best known as a translator in Polish, Argentine Spanish, and Ukrainian, including of Olga Tokarczuk’s International Booker-winning Flights. In Homesick, she turns her words inwards to describe her coming-of-age in Oklahoma. Through fragmented vignettes interspersed with photographs and textual comments, the novel-memoir explores the author (“Amy”)’s relationship with her sister (“Zoe”). The narrative arc of the book has two major parts. In the first, she portrays her childhood and the tender bonds of family and sisterhood. Gradually, though, we see Amy and Zoe grow apart, as Zoe becomes ill from seizures, and Amy leaves home to attend college early. In the second part, we see Amy pursuing her dream of travel and language. But now that she has achieved independence, she is beset by the titular sense of homesickness and longing for the connection once so easily obtained.
Different versions of this book have been billed as a memoir (2019 Unnamed Press, interspersed with photographs; the one I read) or a novel (2022 Charco Press, with extratextual elements removed). I can see how readers would have differing views of the text based on which version they read. For me, the most poignant parts of the book were heightened by knowing that this was a memoir written by a translator, which lent additional credence to her reflections about language as a form of homecoming. It is a delight to see the author’s love for translation slowly develop from a childhood fascination with developing a code language with her sister, and with an intrinsic affinity for the structure that rules can bring to understanding the world - something that she initially affiliates with mathematics, but gradually with language as well. And there is a delight in unraveling the meaning of the choice of the photographs and textual comments that the author has chosen to include alongside the main body of the text (unfortunately not best done in the ebook format I read). A version without these elements - a straightforward coming-of-age narrative - would be less compelling by half.
Different versions of this book have been billed as a memoir (2019 Unnamed Press, interspersed with photographs; the one I read) or a novel (2022 Charco Press, with extratextual elements removed). I can see how readers would have differing views of the text based on which version they read. For me, the most poignant parts of the book were heightened by knowing that this was a memoir written by a translator, which lent additional credence to her reflections about language as a form of homecoming. It is a delight to see the author’s love for translation slowly develop from a childhood fascination with developing a code language with her sister, and with an intrinsic affinity for the structure that rules can bring to understanding the world - something that she initially affiliates with mathematics, but gradually with language as well. And there is a delight in unraveling the meaning of the choice of the photographs and textual comments that the author has chosen to include alongside the main body of the text (unfortunately not best done in the ebook format I read). A version without these elements - a straightforward coming-of-age narrative - would be less compelling by half.