Contemporary
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When Isabel Mendes left Brazil for London the dictatorship under which she had grown up was coming to an end. Instead, she arrived during Thatcher’s crushing of the miners’ strike, resonating with repressions left behind. Engaged in new work and a different culture she changed. Choices arose which distanced her from her origins in ways she never expected. Intellectually and love hungry, she became the partner of a high-flying academic, leading to a shared life in the United States, where they had a daughter, and later in England to where they returned.
Now, Isabel is retired. She has had an academic career. Her mother is dying. She has never wanted to erase her Brazilian family from her life, but her four siblings act as though she has cut ties with them and their history. As her mother dies and leaves her thirty-five years of letters between London, Boston, Leeds, and Brazil, the archive provides a guide for her memories of choices, risks, fear, loneliness, and courage.
Not to Fall on Ice is the story of a woman remembering and accounting for the strangeness of her place in divergent cultures, changing times, and family connections.
Here's what readers have to say about this book....
This is a remarkable book, which has the intimate appeal of memoir and the narrative energy of a good novel. It is the story of one woman's life as she has lived it across cultures and languages, revolving between her birthplace of Brazil and her adult life in America and Europe, while valiantly keeping her footing on those slippery surfaces. It is the story of a clever woman's ambitions fulfilled, but also the story of estrangement, always lived in a mesh of possibilities, a superb example of transcultural life-writing.
This is an amazing and very powerful book. The author shares, through Isabel the difficulties of being the ‘outsider’. As a bright young person in a family she doesn’t quite fit in, as a women, as someone immigrating and dual linguist, a lover, a wife, mother and not least a professional woman Isobel takes one on a journey that is both heartbreaking and shows impressive tenacity.
This is a most novel book, written as stories across an intellectual woman’s life. Elizabeth Silva writes in the first person but as Isabel Mendes, growing up in a small town in Brazil. She is the eldest of five children, and very close to both her mother and grandmother. They too are storytellers. In her teens, Isabel goes to university and engages in student and socialist politics. She finds herself becoming more and more cosmopolitan. She travels for personal and professional reasons. She becomes, first a student in France and later transfers to the UK, where she settles. This is where I feel her life has many resonances with mine. Throughout her life, Isabel corresponds with her family, especially her mother. Indeed, the book begins with Isabel finding a cache of letters by which to structure the novel. Letter writing is a long-forgotten art, but Isabel, or Elizabeth, reclaims this elegiac way of writing. The title of the book refers to a comment made to Isabel as a young child. This beautiful story ends with a similar comment being made to Isabel’s grandchild. It is a very good read, based as it is on Latin American story-telling.
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