{"product_id":"after-life-11","title":"After Life","description":"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. \u003cp\u003eHecht 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWith 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA call and response of truth and invention, mental illness and yearning, \u003ci\u003eAfter Life\u003c\/i\u003e is a tribute to and reinterpretation of the Latin American \u003ci\u003etestimonio\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Duke University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54259071844696,"sku":"9780822337881","price":29.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780822337881.jpg?v=1781695833","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/after-life-11","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}