Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues

Description:

Named a Must-Read by Ms. and Autostraddle

Winner of the German Book Prize, the Swiss Book Prize, and the Jürgen Ponto Foundation Literature Prize

A prizewinning, boundary-breaking debut exploring family, class, history, and the true idea of the self.

A glorious, tender, unsparing exploration of language, family, history, class, self, and the human, Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues begins with the loss of memory. As their grandmother falls into dementia, the narrator begins to ask questions--to fill in the silences and the gaps. Childhood memories resurface, revealing a path into the past. The maternal line leads toward nature, witchcraft, freedom, and power. Could this be where the narrator belongs?

A quest toward understanding, a story of liberation--from generational trauma, gender constructs, class identity, the limits of language--this narrative invents its own forms, words, and bodies to conjure and cast out the very idea of the unspeakable. It searches for other kinds of knowledge and traditions, other ways of becoming, and reaches for wisdom beyond the human. In Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues, Kim de l'Horizon reimagines family narratives, abandoning the linear in favor of a fluid, incantatory, expansive search into who we are.

Brief description: Kim de l'Horizon is a Swiss novelist, performer, and playwright. Kim was born in 2666 on Gethen, a planet much freer than this one. Landing here on Earth was hard, as there is so much yet to change, so much at the edges of the horizon yet to be brought into the center, so much "I" yet to be fluidified. Kim studies witchcraft with Starhawk, as well as how sedentarization is the cause of our current mess. Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues is Kim's debut novel. Originally published in German as Blutbuch, it won the Jürgen Ponto Foundation Literature Prize, the German Book Prize, and the Swiss Book Prize. It has been translated into seventeen languages and adapted several times for the stage.

Review Quotes:

"A joyous investment in the power of language to reveal and then transform."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"An expansive and imaginative approach to family narrative"
--Autostraddle

"A gift, challenging and rewarding at once . . . It feels like a disservice to attempt to capture all the extraordinary facets, intricate nuances, raw brilliance, captivating beauty, and audacious courage this book so boldly embodies."
--Britta Stromeyer, On the Seawall

"Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues offers an exquisite portrait of the bewilderment and clear-sightedness of childhood. Fluidly and mellifluously translated by Jamie Lee Searle, this is a portrait of possibility, and also of pain. The possibility of freedom stands shimmering in myriad moments: alive, ungendered, real, unerasable."
--Moriel Rothman-Zecher, author of Before All the World

"Kim de l'Horizon has managed that rare thing: an honest love letter. At once kaleidoscopic and urgent, Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues is an exquisite inquiry into what it means to be an individual in a body, a family, a society, with all the attendant misery, humor, joy and enduring mystery."
--Krystelle Bamford, author of Idle Grounds

"A meteorite."
--Télérama

"One can only marvel at the literary mastery."
--Die Zeit

"An ambitious queer coming of-age novel about family, language, and writing . . . A crucible of absolute stylistic liberty."
--El Diario

"Multilayered, eloquent, powerful . . . [Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues] explodes the boundaries of the genre."
--Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

"[Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues] surprises and amazes again and again through the mutability of language, the play with forms and text flows, and above all through the clever and witty narrative style, which in the end arranges all the seemingly contradictory building blocks into one big, impressive And."
--Ö1 Kultur aktuell

"Powerful . . . [A novel] about what it means to be human in a gendered, classist and sexist world."
--The Times Literary Supplement

"Wildly inventive."
--Le Monde