Otto|Lisa St Aubin de Terán Rynveld 9029074868

||boek: Otto|Roman|Meulenhoff

||door: Lisa St Aubin de Terán Rynveld

||taal: nl
||jaar: 2004
||druk: ?
||pag.: 478p
||opm.: paperback|zo goed als nieuw|1 notitie (voornaam)

||isbn: 90-290-7486-8
||code: 1:000190

--- Over het boek (foto 1): Otto ---

Toen Lisa St Aubin de Terán in de jaren zeventig op een haciënda in Venezuela woonde, ontmoette ze daar de rebel Osvaldo Baretto Milani, codenaam Otto. Ze sloten vriendschap voor het leven. Ook nadat ze Venezuela verliet, bleef Lisa hem zien, in Salamanca, Heidelberg, Algiers en Havana. Hun vriendschap speelde een belangrijke rol in Lisa St Aubin de Teráns eerdere boeken De stoptrein naar Milaan en De haciënda.

Maar Otto werd ziek. Op zijn ziekbed in Parijs vertelde hij Lisa openhartig over zijn leven als socioloog, journalist en revolutionair, en hij gaf haar toestemming ermee te doen wat ze wilde. In Otto schetst Lisa St Aubin de Terán nu het bewogen portret van een man die door een toeval in zijn jeugd zou uitgroeien tot een van de invloedrijkste revolutionairen van Venezuela.

Met zijn mooie stem en onweerstaanbare gave in het openbaar te spreken, zweepte Otto ooit in zijn vijftienjarige onschuld zijn dorp op. Nog voor hij was uitgesproken, hadden de autoriteiten hem van school verwijderd en tot 'vijand van de regering' verklaard. Otto groeide later uit tot een held van zijn volk, ongrijpbaar en symbool van het verzet tegen de dictatuur. Met zijn liefde voor literatuur en vrouwelijk schoon en zijn niet-aflatende strijd voor politieke idealen was hij een even fascinerende als dubbelzinnige figuur.

Otto is een niet te missen nieuwe roman in de reeks bestsellers die Lisa St Aubin de Terán bij Meulenhoff publiceerde: een meeslepend verhaal vol passie en spanning, zoals we van haar gewend zijn.

[bron: https--www.bol.com]

Semi-historische Engelse roman over een Venezuelaanse revolutionair en socioloog.

Oswaldo Barreto Miliani kreeg de codenaam Otto toen hij zich aansloot bij de communisten in Venezuela die zich sterk maakten om hun land te bevrijden van de rechtse regering die de boeren arm hield. Al op school hield Oswaldo zijn eerste toespraken waarin hij rechtstreeks het volk tegen de regering ophitste. Hij hield van toespraken houden en van lezen. Zijn grootste droom was om naar Parijs te gaan, het mekka van schrijvers die daar al hun ideeën uitwisselden.

Deze droom kwam uit in 1953 toen hij voor zijn veiligheid niet meer in Venezuela kon blijven. Zo begonnen Otto's zwerftochten door de wereld. Altijd geleid door de hoop eens met een revolutionair legertje zijn moederland weer binnen te kunnen vallen om het volk te bevrijden.

Op zijn omzwervingen leerde hij echter hoe verschillend en medogenloos revolutionairen kunnen zijn. Na zijn opleiding tot guerilla in Cuba en zijn bezoek aan China wilde hij niets meer met de communisten te maken hebben.

Ondanks alle ontberingen, angst om opgepakt te worden, telkens opnieuw beginnen met een nieuwe revolutionaire cel en ondanks dat hij diep in zijn hart gewoon een filosoof wilde zijn, liet het idee om Venezuela te bevrijden hem niet los.

Pas toen zijn missie daadwerkelijk mislukte in Venezuela en hij de bloederige staatsgreep in Chili meemaakte, besloot hij dat je, ook al bedoel je het zo goed, niet zomaar jouw mening aan een volk kunt opdringen. Na vele jaren een van de meest gezochte mannen van Venezuela geweest te zijn kreeg hij amnestie en kon hij terugkeren naar zijn land. Hij ging weer les geven op de universiteit en kreeg zelfs een diplomatieke post bij de Franse regering aangeboden.

Het was toen dat hij ziek werd en aan zijn ziekbed vertelde hij over zijn leven aan de schrijfster en de vrouw van een van zijn vrienden: Lisa St Aubin de Terán.

Lisa St Aubin was 16 jaar en woonde in Londen toen ze op een hoek van de straat de Venezuelaanse revolutionair Jaime de Terán ontmoette. Binnen het jaar waren ze getrouwd en volgde Lisa Jaime en zijn vrienden die van onderduikadres naar onderduikadres trokken, van land naar land. Het verhaal van deze omzwervingen heeft ze opgenomen in haar roman De stoptrein naar Milaan.

Toen Jaime weer welkom was in Venezuela volgde ze hem naar zijn haciënda Santa Rita in de Andes. Haar ervaringen uit die jaren beschreef ze later in haar boek De haciënda.

Terwijl de heren het revolutionaire vuur enigszins hadden verloren begon Lisa aan haar eigen zwerftocht. Na Venezuela ging ze terug naar Engeland waar ze een Schotse dichter huwde en in een stukje onherbergzaam Schotland ging wonen. Haar derde man was een schilder met wie ze een huis in Italië kocht, waarover ze in Een huis in Italië schreef. Momenteel (2018) woont ze in met een Nederlandse cameraman in Mozambique.

Het was dan ook een goede keuze van Oswaldo Barreto Miliani om Lisa St Aubin de Terán een boek over hem te laten schrijven. Het is een passioneel verhaal geworden over een man die zijn ziel probeert te zuiveren, de lasterpraat probeert te ontzenuwen en zijn leven blootlegt aan de lezers. Het is een fascinerend verhaal geworden over een man die geheel in de ban raakt van het communisme en vervolgens een opstandeling blijft in hart en ziel. Het is het verhaal over revolutionaire omzwervingen, over pogingen en mislukkingen, over zwakte en overwinningen.

St Aubin de Terán geeft een menselijk gezicht aan de revolutie en gunt de lezers een blik op de woelige tijden in de jaren 50, 60 en 70, een tijd van revoluties, opstanden en staatsgrepen zoals in Cuba, Parijs en Chili. Het is niet alleen een roerend portret van een man geworden, maar ook een boeiend tijdsbeeld van wereldrevolutionairen en Zuid-Amerikaanse ballingen in Europa.

De lijst romans van Lisa St Aubin de Terán is te lang om op te noemen. Naast haar boeken over Zuid-Amerika en Italië is er nu deze wereldomspannende roman waarin de geschiedenis van Zuid-Amerika en Europa samenkomen. Otto is een meesterlijke roman dat zowel het talent van de schrijfster laat zien als het leven van een man die zich in de woelige wereld van de strijd tegen het kapitalisme liet leiden door zijn idealen.

[bron: https--smitakisboekenlust.com]

Oswaldo Antonio Barreto Miliani is an unlikely revolutionary hero. He was born a sickly child in 1930s Venezuela with recurrent nightmares and covered in black hair from head to foot "like some kind of monkey". Improbable or not, he is, however, the real-life figure codenamed Otto, trusted adviser to Fidel Castro in Cuba and friend of Salvador Allende in Chile. Lisa St Aubin de Terán's extraordinary novel charts Otto's transformations movingly. It is not a tidy book, but it sprawls seductively, tantalising the reader with elements of biography and even autobiography.

St Aubin de Terán is not only a friend of Otto - who allowed her to piece together his life story so inspirationally - but has a life of her own which reads like a magic-realist novel. At the age of 16, she met a Venezuelan aristocrat, Don Jaime Terán, two decades her senior, on a south London street and married him the following year. It later emerged - when she sought to take out a loan for her Venezuelan hacienda - that there was hardly a local bank he had not been accused of robbing. She has written very affectingly about this period in her 1997 memoir, The Hacienda. A friend of Otto's, though long since divorced from Lisa, Jaime appears in this latest book too, but he is a minor player who gets off lightly.

Otto himself became a revolutionary by accident. We are guided along his picaresque evolution from adolescent, rabble-raising orator to university lecturer and reluctant warrior. No wonder he is fond of citing the French Nobel prize-winning biologist Jacques Monod, whose 1971 book, Le hasard et la necessité, famously claims that human beings exist only by chance.

After a soul-destroying 1953 stay in the Spanish town of Salamanca, he moves to Paris, where he is bitten by a prostitute and witnesses the police shooting of a friend during a peaceful pro-Algerian protest (the pool of the man's blood is memorably described as filling with magenta "the way the sea colours when your boat squashes a starfish as it beaches").

It is in Paris that Otto meets his wife to be, Vida, a beautiful Persian woman later to spend 19 years in an Iranian jail under the shah for leading a Kurdish rebellion there. Their love affair is launched inauspiciously. When she intervenes to prevent her handsome lover from kicking him, Otto declares: "Maybe I exaggerated her response a little when I took this as an open invitation to sleep with her." With scathing wit, Otto is soon summing up the doomed nature of the relationship: "I blamed her for not loving me enough, and she blamed me for not being someone else. This is hardly the stuff of diamond jubilees!"

Once he is back in Venezuela, Otto's relationship with the Communist party is as troubled as his marriage. He speaks of feeling like an escaped convict carrying the left leg of a missing comrade over his shoulder, only in his own case his burden is "a decaying ideology". Yet the cold war sparks him back into life. Venezuela was "the one and only oil-rich country in Latin America, and under no circumstances was the United States going to let it turn red." He joins the Venezuelan guerrilla movement in 1963 and, three years later, impresses Castro in Havana with his commitment to the cause by being the only member of the audience to stay awake as Fidel reads out letters of instructions - or chastisement - to his followers for nine hours.

Otto comes to understand that "there is nothing more real than war". As a well-known sociology lecturer, however, he retains a nagging sense of being an outsider. He represents the intelligentsia, and the ambivalence towards this role in Latin American life is tellingly articulated in Otto's own description: "I was a famous intellectual in Latin America, and the more intelligent of the veterans resented me for that. They really hated me. I was a sneak in their eyes: someone on friendly terms with all the leaders, great and small ... They were great warriors and I was a fraud."

Otto readily concedes that he is "not naturally, a man's man. I have to find my way into a group of men like a worm on a computer." But he is capable of acts of heroism. In one remarkable episode, he finds himself in charge of steering an arms-laden boat into Port of Spain harbour in the knowledge that, of the four entrances, three are lethally treacherous.

What separates him from the group - and makes him such an alluring personality - is a sense of detachment: he remains profoundly aware of the gap between the universal battle for justice and a better world on the one hand, and the everyday realities of life on the other.

This dazzling book echoes the works of two great Brazilian novelists: the 19th-century Machado de Assis's humorously confessional tone and the 20th-century Jorge Amado's larger-than-life characters. It sweeps us across the world and then lands back in Latin America, where Otto's insights are enlightening. He illuminates President Allende's desperate last months in power in Chile before the Pinochet coup (although the northern town of Antofagasta is misspelled several times). And intriguingly, Otto interprets the celebrated line from Pablo Neruda's "Poem 20" ("I no longer love her, that is certain, but maybe I love her ... ") as a reflection of "dithering as a national [Chilean] characteristic". In contrast, Otto believes that Venezuelans' greatest weakness is "not being able to go beyond what we can touch with our 10 fingers".

In the end, Otto's honesty and the power of his and St Aubin de Terán's storytelling may leave us persuaded that the legacy of the Spanish conquest "are five elements forever present in Latin American society: greed, lust, cruelty, truth and poetry".

[source: https--www.theguardian.com]

--- Over (foto 2): Lisa St Aubin de Terán Rynveld ---

Lisa St Aubin de Terán (Londen, 2 oktober 1953) is een Engels schrijfster.

Lisa St Aubin de Terán werd in 1953 geboren als dochter van de Brits-Guyaanse schrijver Jan Carew en Joan Mary Murray. Ze groeide op in Londen. Haar werk is deels autobiografisch, deels fictie.

In De Hacienda beschrijft ze hoe ze op jonge leeftijd met haar eerste echtgenoot Jaime Téran op een afgelegen boerderij in de Andes (Venezuela) ging wonen.

Haar tweede echtgenoot was de Schotse dichter en romanschrijver George MacBeth. In 1982 publiceerde ze haar eerste roman Keepers of the House (Hoeders van het huis). In 1983 volgde The Slow Train to Milan (De stoptrein naar Milaan) In 1983 verhuisde ze naar Wiggenhall St. Mary Magdalen in Norfolk.

Haar derde echtgenoot was de schilder Robbie Duff Scott, met wie ze naar Umbrië (Italië) verhuisde. Ze beschreef haar leven met hem in A Valley in Italy (Een huis in Italië) (1995).

Ze heeft drie kinderen, onder wie dochter Iseult Teran, die ook schrijfster is. Ze leeft met haar vierde echtgenoot, de Nederlandse cameraman Mees van Deth in Mossuril, Nampula, Mozambique. Deze fase in haar leven is beschreven in Mozambique Mysteries (Mijn dorp in Mozambique) (2007).

In 2004 heeft ze de Terán Foundation opgezet. Deze stichting heeft diverse projecten opgezet in Mossuril, Mozambique.

Publicaties (Nederlandse vertalingen)

• Mijn dorp in Mozambique. Vert. door Anke ten Doeschate en René van Veen. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff 2007. ISBN 978-90-290-8064-4
• Mezzanotte. Een Italiaanse liefdesgeschiedenis. Vert. door Manon Smits. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 2005. ISBN 90-290-7663-1
• Otto. Roman. Vert. door Janneke van Horn. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 2004. ISBN 90-290-7486-8
• La festa. Verhalen. Vert. door Anneke Goddijn. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 2000. ISBN 90-290-6779-9
• De haciënda. Mijn jaren in Venezuela. Vert. door Anneke Goddijn. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1998. ISBN 90-290-6717-9
• De tijger. Roman. Vert. door Anneke Goddijn. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1999. ISBN 90-290-5862-5
• De aarde, de lucht, het water en het vuur van Italië. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1999. ISBN 90-290-5911-7
• Het paleis. Roman. Vert. door Anneke Goddijn. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1997. ISBN 90-290-5309-7
• Hoeders van het huis. Roman. Vert. door Anneke Goddijn. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1996. ISBN 90-290-5093-4
• Zee van verlangen Vert. door Anneke Goddijn. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1995. Geen ISBN
• Rosalind. Roman. Vert. door Ellen Beek en Aad Nuis. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1994. ISBN 90-290-4510-8
• Een huis in Italië. De vele seizoenen van een villa in Umbrië. Vert. door Anneke Goddijn. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1994. ISBN 90-290-4786-0
• De stoptrein naar Milaan. Roman. Vert. door Ellen Beek en Aad Nuis. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1993. ISBN 90-290-4063-7
• Op doorreis. Belevenissen van een treinverslaafde. Autobiografie in reisverhalen. Vert. door Ellen Beek en Aad Nuis. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1992. ISBN 90-290-2767-3
• Joanna (roman). Vert. door Ellen Beek en Aad Nuis. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1991. ISBN 90-290-9858-9
• Schaamteloze reizen. Verhalen van vrouwen onderweg. Samengest. door Lisa St Aubin de Terán. Utrecht, Veen, 1990. ISBN 90-204-2473-4

[bron: wikipedia]

Lisa St. Aubin de Terán was born Lisa Rynveld in South London. She attended the James Allen's Girls' School. She married a Venezuelan landowner, Jaime Terán in 1971, at the age of 17, and became a farmer of sugar cane, avocados, pears, and sheep from 1972-1978.

Her second husband was the Scottish poet and novelist George MacBeth. After the marriage failed, she married painter Robbie Duff Scott and moved to Umbria, Italy.

In 1982, St. Aubin de Terán published her first novel, Keepers of the House. This novel was the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award. Her second novel, The Slow Train to Milan, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She received the Eric Gregory for Poetry in 1983. Her work includes novels, memoirs, poetry, and short-story collections.

St. Aubin de Terán has three children, including a daughter by her first husband, Iseult Teran, who is also a novelist.

She currently lives in Amsterdam with her partner Mees Van Deth, where she runs a film company and has set up the Terán Foundation in Mozambique.

[source: https--www.goodreads.com]

Nationality: British.
Born: Lisa Rynveld, London, 1953.
Education: Attended school in London.
Career: Farmer of sugar cane, avocados, pears, and sheep, Venezuela, 1972-78. Since 1972, writer.
Awards: Somerset Maugham award, 1983, for The Long Way Home; John Llewellyn Rhys memorial prize, 1983, for Slow Train to Milan; Eric Gregory award, 1983, for poetry.
Agent: A.M. Heath, 79 St. Martins Lane, London WC2N 4AA, England.

PUBLICATIONS

Novels

• Keepers of the House. London, Cape, 1982; as The Long Way Home, New York, Harper and Row, and London, Cape, 1983.
• The Slow Train to Milan. London, Cape, and New York, Harper andRow, 1983.
• The Tiger. London, Cape, 1984.
• The Bay of Silence. London, Cape, 1986.
• Black Idol. London, Cape, 1987.
• Joanna. London, Virago, 1990; New York, Carroll and Graf, 1991.
• Nocturne. London, Hamilton, 1992; New York, St. Martin's Press, 1993.
• The Palace. London, Macmillan, 1997, Hopewell, New Jersey, EccoPress, 1999.

Short Stories

• The Marble Mountain and Other Stories. London, Cape, 1989.
• Southpaw: Short Stories. London, Virago Press, 1999.

Poetry

• The Streak. Knotting, Martin Booth, 1980.
• The High Place. London, Cape, 1985.

Other

• Off the Rails: Memoirs of a Train Addict. London, Bloomsbury, 1989.
• Landscape in Italy, with photographs by John Ferro Sims . London, Pavilion, 1989.
• Venice: The Four Seasons, with photographs by Mick Lindberg. London, Pavilion, and New York, Clarkson Potter, 1992.
• A Valley in Italy: Confessions of a House Addict. London, Hamilton, 1994; published as A Valley in Italy: The Many Seasons of a Villa in Umbria, New York, HarperCollins, 1994.
• The Hacienda: A Memoir. Boston, Little Brown, 1997.
• Editor, Indiscreet Journeys: Stories of Women on the Road. London, Virago, 1989; Boston, Faber, 1990.

Much of Lisa St. Aubin de Teran's early work was autobiographical, and chronologically the fictionalized events of Keepers of the House, although published first, followed her second novel, The Slow Train to Milan. St. Aubin de Teran is unusual for an English writer in setting her fiction abroad, often in Italy and South America. Her extraordinary sense of place, perhaps more obviously than her characterization, has made her work distinguished and memorable.

Little happens in Keepers of the House, which concerns the final decay of an old farmhouse, La Bebella, near Venezuela. The second last survivor of the Beltrán family, Diego, has married Lydia, an Englishwoman. They return to La Bebella, where years of drought and disease have gradually driven the servants away. Previously uncommunicative by nature, Diego slips into a deep depression and becomes a hermit-like recluse. Lydia has to manage the dilapidated farm and the uncertain avocado and sugar crops, despite being nearly defeated by the effect of the death of her newborn son. Lydia is sustained by Benito, an old retainer who relates to her two centuries of Beltrán family history. These exotic legends of this once powerful family are a rare imaginative achievement, and such writing has earned St. Aubin de Teran the accolade of the English Márquez. One learns little of Lydia or Diego, who is eventually paralyzed by a stroke; as in much of St. Aubin de Teran's writing, the past matters more than the present. The carefully detailed descriptive passages evoke a sympathy for the long-dead characters and their struggles. When the barren lands yield nothing more, Lydia abandons La Bebella when Benito dies, carrying her invalid husband to a jeep, to escape to a place of safety. Lydia, once again pregnant, has inherited a knowledge she can pass to her child. Only Diego's cousin, Christebal Beltrán, aged about 112, remains as a sentinel watching over the deserted valley.

The Slow Train to Milan has no plot, only a series of rather fantastic episodes about political exiles from South America on the run in Europe. The tone of the novel is casual, from the rapid marriage of Lisaveta, the sixteen-year-old narrator, to César, an amiable if self-centered eccentric. He and his exiled friends, Otto and Elias, are mysterious figures who shuffle aimlessly with Lisaveta between cities living in borrowed accommodations, pawning valuables for survival when their money runs outs, and fluctuating between the extremes of poverty and luxury. The uncomplaining, adventurous Lisaveta, though curious about her husband's past and his friends, rarely questions them and is content to be part of their unsettled existence, much of it spent on "the slow train to Milan." The novel depends on the atmosphere of the innumerable contrasting places the travelers visit and people they encounter and the tension created by the constant fear that these exiles will be caught. The narrator identifies herself at least partly with St. Aubin de Teran and Lydia, remarking that she later grew avocados with her husband in the Andes.

The autobiographical element is less marked in Tiger, where the dominating character is Misia Schmutter, a murderous despot and head of her family, and her grandson, Lucien, whose course of life she influences even from beyond the grave. Nocturne is, perhaps, more plausible; it is a triumph of characterization and evocation of place. The setting is mainly in San Severino, a peasant village in Italy in the first decade of this century; this is where Alessandro Mezzanotte is born and lives until he dies. From the age of fifteen, Mezzanotte is obsessively in love with Valentina, a young gypsy who is part of a traveling fair. For some years he is compelled to travel from San Severino to be wherever the fair is, although his love is scorned by both families. Forced to be in Mussolini's army, Mezzanotte, previously handsome, is blinded and facially scarred and loses an arm when hit by a shell; he is pensioned off. His name, translating as "Midnight," suggests his fate is preordained. However, his solitary life for the next fifty years is endurable because of his unshakable belief that Valentina will come to him, even in old age. Near the end of his life, Mezzanotte is looked after by a young army conscript, Stefano, whose own troubled life and character are deeply affected by the old man, who unburdens his secrets on the soldier. When Mezzanotte dies, Stefano finds Valentina's last letters, which the blind man could not read. To save his sanity, Mezzanotte had been told the reverse of Valentina's intentions. Unable to cope with his appearance, she had, in fact, finally written to say she had discarded Mezzanotte for someone else. Nocturne is poignant and haunting and is a further indication that St. Aubin de Teran has still much to say as a distinctive writer.

Geoffrey Elborn [source: https--biography.jrank.org/pages/4708/St-Aubin-de-Teran-Lisa.html]

Finding an emotional home in other people's roots [1999-07-24]

Lisa St. Aubin de Teran left her home in a south London suburb aged sixteen to marry an exiled Venezuelan and travel around Italy with him and his friends. For seven years subsequently she lived on his remote sugar-cane hacienda in the Venezuelan Andes. Both experiences provided material for novels, published in the early 80s, and more recently for The Hacienda, a memoir. Her penchant for posing languidly in Edwardian dress (see the cover of The Hacienda) gives the impression that St. Aubin de Teran is a less-than-serious writer, which is a pity.

Southpaw, her latest collection of stories, has no author portrait, and by the end of the second paragraph of the very first story even the most sceptical should be convinced that she is a talented, observant and accomplished writer.

For the past ten years St. Aubin de Teran has lived in a small village in Umbria. The stories here all evolve around the two rural communities which she has come to know, in Venezuela and in Italy. As she says in the introduction: "in the absence of anywhere else to specifically claim as home, I have found an emotional home in other peoples roots."

The two communities, Venezuelan and Italian, are united by the theme expressed in her title. The stories are about outsiders, whose survival is as much due to their ability to absorb blows as to deliver them. St. Aubin de Teran responds wholeheartedly to both place and people, and is obviously a patient listener. The hours she has spent absorbing other people's lives give her stories an unusual veracity, both physical and mental. She is a magnificent story-teller, and has the unusual ability to retell the lives of an illiterate peasantry in such a way as to give their hopes and beliefs dignity and integrity. The best of these stories carry the weight of fable or folklore. "Eladio and the Boy" reveals the deep logic behind the apparently irrational obsession with an eagle that dominates the lives of a brain-damaged man and his dumb son. "Antonio Mezzanotte" portrays the life of an Umbrian village by following a blind man and recounting his past.

Those familiar with her novels and memoirs will occasionally recognise characters they know, but nothing is lost by encountering St Aubin de Teran's work for the first time in this form. In fact, her stories are a perfect introduction to the unusually wide range, both geographic and emotional, that she covers.

ALANNAH HOPKIN, Alannah Hopkin is a writer and critic [source: https--www.irishtimes.com/news/finding-an-emotional-home-in-other-people-s-roots-1.210223]