The Factory of Facts: A Memoir - Softcover

Sante, Lucy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679746501 ISBN 13: 9780679746508

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1999

Synopsis

The acclaimed author of Low Life reinvents the memoir in a cunning, lyrical book that is at once a personal history and a meditation on the construction of identity.

Born in Belgium but raised in New Jersey, Luc Sante transformed himself from a pious, timid Belgian boy into a loutish American adolescent, who eschewed French while fantasizing about the pop star Françoise Hardy. To show how this transformation came about--and why it remained incomplete--The Factory of Facts  combines family anecdote and ancestral legend; detailed forays into Belgian history, language, and religion; and deft synopses of the American character.

About this title

Review:

Luc Sante's memoir/history features the same elegant, faintly sardonic prose that distinguished his first book, Low Life. Born in Belgium in 1954, transplanted to New Jersey at age 5, he intermingles evocative material about his familial and national past with glimpses of his American experiences. Sante's not one to bare his soul, but the cumulative effect of his impressionistic technique is revealing: when he describes the hallmarks of his natal land as "ambivalence, invisibility, secretiveness, self-doubt, passivity, irony, and derision," we infer that these traits also form the author's essence.

From the Back Cover:

Sante has a historian's fiendish taste for information. . . a journalist's wit, resourcefulness and love of idiosyncracy."         

--The New York Times Book Review

"Remarkable. . . . Sante makes a reader want to know him." --The Boston Globe

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0679746501
• ISBN 13: 9780679746508
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320