by Julie Otsuka · Bollati Boringhieri · tapa blanda · ISBN 9788833939827
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«Nuoto libero» is the novel by Julie Otsuka, published by Bollati Boringhieri in paperback (144 pages, in Italian).
A community of regular swimmers finds in its underground pool a refuge of calm and routine until a crack in the bottom sows unease. In parallel, the memory of Alice, one of the swimmers, begins to crumble, and her daughter tries to reconstruct her past: childhood, the internment of Japanese Americans, her marriage, and the loss of a newborn daughter. Otsuka interweaves both stories with restrained and moving prose about decline, filial love, and identity.
Novel belonging to the Varianti collection. Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal in the fiction category (2023); the original English title is The Swimmers.
Julie Otsuka is a Japanese-American author. She is known for drawing from her personal life to write autoethnographical historical novels about the life of Japanese Americans. In 2002 she published her first novel, When the Emperor was Divine, which is about the Japanese-American internment camps that took place in 1942-45 during World War II. The story begins in California, where she was born and raised, and it is based on Otsuka's grandfather who was arrested as a suspected spy for Japan the day after Pearl Harbor. Her novel, in 2003, received an award from the Asian American Literary Award and American Library Association Alex Award. Otsuka continued to write about her family's history and in 2011 published her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, which takes place in the early 1900s and discusses the marriages of Japanese women who immigrated to the United States to marry men they knew only through photographs. These women are known as "picture brides" for this reason. During this year, she also published a short story titled "Diem Perdidi," that translates to "I have lost the day," which dives into a more personal space as it is based on her mother who had frontotemporal dementia. This short story was the beginning of her third novel published in 2022 titled, The Swimmers, which further relates her experience as the daughter of a mother with frontotemporal dementia.
