Todas nuestras maldiciones se cumplieron
Tamara Tenenbaum
NOVEL | 2021 | 144 pages
"Some mothers tell their kids stories every night, or think that cooking for them is sacred. But for over twenty years, ever since my father died, my mom has no time for sacred things."
This novel is the coming-of-age story of a girl who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community until one winter morning, a bomb went off in the Once neighborhood in Buenos Aires and shattered everything she thought was certain.
From the death of her father during the attack onward, men appear in the background of this novel, like ghosts. Women, instead, have the strength and determination of those who need to get ahead on their own, with the limitations imposed on their gender by the environment they find themselves in. But the protagonist isn't willing to accept mandates that become more and more absurd as she grows older. Like her mother, she believes that the only way to make sure something is done right is to do it herself, and that is her only religion.
Tamara Tenenbaum tells a story that is both personal and generational, permeated by a latent tension that shapes all of the relationships. With a dry, ironic tone and streaks of dark humor, the author describes the atmosphere of her childhood and adolescence within orthodoxy and her breakaway from that background, both real and imagined, in her search for less-suffocating horizons. This search brings the promise of sexual liberty and love, but also bewilderment—the feelings of inadequacy in a world that hasn't been designed in advance.
RIGHTS: spanish PLANETA | italian FANDANGO | film/tv MGM
“I had been wondering why there wasn’t a voice like Tamara Tenenbaum’s for a long time—a contemporary voice with the ease of Natalia Ginzburg’s or Irene Nemirovsky’s, depicting the life of a contemporary young Latin American Jewish woman. Her family life, but also her social life, her love life, her interior life (the things running through her mind at any given moment), her fantasies, her existential doubts. ‘Todas nuestras maldiciones se cumplieron’ is written with that voice. (...) ‘Todas nuestras maldiciones se cumplieron’ can be read with a constant smile and even laughter at times, but this is by no means a frivolous book. On the contrary: there is much wisdom in these pages that has been acquired through the tragic events of existence. This is one of those books that trap us with its enjoyable prose and apparent lightness but that, without us even noticing, starts planting a series of explosive mines in our heads.” ”
BY TAMARA TENENBAUM:
La última actriz
NOVEL, 2024
Todas nuestras maldiciones se cumplieron
NOVEL, 2021
Nadie vive tan cerca de nadie
STORIES, 2020
El fin del amor
NON FICTION, 2019
Reconocimiento de terreno
POETRY, 2017