Family Life – A Bridge Between Harmony and Agony , livre ebook

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC - Gheorghe Virtosu

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

148 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Family Life - A Bridge Between Harmony and Agony is a novel which skillfully binds together the idyllic and the mundane as two sides of the same coin. The driving force behind this masterful writing is profound sorrow experienced by author Gheorghe Virtosu in his relationship with his older sister, Maria, throughout their childhood. It is the gritty testimony of a child struggling to come to terms with his own feelings and thoughts, with his nearest and dearest, and with the world around. The quest becomes a meaningful and empowering statement of self-belief and self-discovery, as in the end, the sworn-enemy siblings turn out to be the best of friends throughout their teenage and, really, for the rest of their lives. The autobiographical recount gently and seamlessly seeps into fantasy, bringing to the forefront the charming story of a duckling and his family. An unmissable must-read!

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Memoir

Informations

Publié par	Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
Date de parution	30 août 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781645367468
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	23 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0175€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Family Life – A Bridge Between Harmony and Agony
Gheorghe Virtosu
Austin Macauley Publishers
2019-08-30
Family Life – A Bridge Between Harmony and Agony About the Author About the Book Dedication Copyright Information © The Joys of Childhood The Legend of the Beauty Spot
About the Author
Born in the Republic of Moldova in 1968, Gheorghe Virtosu has lived an intense and eventful life: after enjoying an idyllic childhood in his village, he left his parents’ home at 15 for the middle school in town, which eventually led to a military career. Established in London in 1992, he gained British citizenship a few years later. Having simplicity as a guiding principle and solitude as his main source of inspiration, Gheorghe Virtosu is rapidly becoming a household name in literature, with his mammoth novel, A Little Frog’s Heart , already a landmark on the compulsory reading list.
About the Book
Family Life – A Bridge Between Harmony and Agony is a novel which skillfully binds together the idyllic and the mundane as two sides of the same coin. The driving force behind this masterful writing is profound sorrow experienced by author Gheorghe Virtosu in his relationship with his older sister, Maria, throughout their childhood. It is the gritty testimony of a child struggling to come to terms with his own feelings and thoughts, with his nearest and dearest, and with the world around. The quest becomes a meaningful and empowering statement of self-belief and self-discovery, as in the end, the sworn-enemy siblings turn out to be the best of friends throughout their teenage and, really, for the rest of their lives. The autobiographical recount gently and seamlessly seeps into fantasy, bringing to the forefront the charming story of a duckling and his family. An unmissable must-read!
Dedication
This volume is dedicated to one of my four sisters: Maria.
Copyright Information ©
Gheorghe Virtosu (2019)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Ordering Information:
Quantity sales: special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Virtosu, Gheorghe
Family Life – A Bridge Between Harmony and Agony
ISBN 9781643783260 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781643783277 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781645367468 (ePub e-book)
The main category of the book — Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019908138
www.austinmacauley.com/us
First Published (2019)
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
40 Wall Street, 28th Floor
New York, NY 10005
USA
mail-usa@austinmacauley.com
+1 (646) 5125767

Maria was the joy, as much as she was the sorrow, of my childhood.
We used to belong to a large family, out of which Maria and I were the youngest of six siblings. She was three years older than me.
One by one, the older siblings left home and the village for the big schools in the city, each trying to find their path in life. Just like birds of a feather who desert the nest and spread their wings to fly the width and length of the earth. In the same way, all of them picked up and went off on their own personal quest to explore and discover their destiny in waiting. As human beings, we crave exhilaration and cradle the dream of self-fulfillment throughout our entire life, and my older siblings were no different in that respect.
During that time, Maria and I were still children in my parents’ house and had years more to spend growing up together. Needless to say that Maria became my closest friend and ally in mischief, and I’m not counting for a moment the many occasions I got myself in trouble while ganging up with the other boys in the neighborhood.
Only Mom was closer to me at that time.
While the whole family lived under one roof, the age-gap between Maria and myself went unnoticed at the best of times, since everybody else regarded us as the youngest. As soon as we found ourselves the only children in the house, however, the fiercest rivalry broke out between us. And despite the relatively small difference in age, Maria used to play me for a fool all the time: being a girl stood in her favor, as she matured at a much faster pace and it soon became obvious that she had the upper-hand on me. I often looked at her and wondered whether I got my numbers right: how come that the three years separating us seemed more like ten? Perhaps many of the tactics she employed had been first-hand experience that she had to put up with while our older siblings were around. If so, it was only natural that she passed it down to me as you would with a set of clothes you’ve grown out of, but your youngest brother can still use.
Whatever the reason, Maria took every opportunity to trick me, making sure I took the entire blame for what was usually her own making. Even to this day, I think back and can’t quite work out when and how the rivalry between us had turned utterly uncompromising and, at times, downright nasty.
Like all my other sisters, Maria was an eminent pupil in school from the beginning to the end. I, on the other hand, was trailing behind everybody else in my class. Odd situation to be in, which often had me puzzled as to why I had failed so badly where my sisters succeeded time and time again.
A possible answer to my question could be the teamwork which my sisters practiced all along amongst themselves. With Maria being the youngest of them, she had full attention most of the time, as the older ones were bending over backwards to please her.
Thus, having reaped the benefits of knowledge and wisdom from her senior siblings, Maria made it her mission in life to educate me in the same way she had been educated by our sisters. She had decided to keep me on the straight and narrow, and that was a promise to herself and to my parents!
Much as it suited me in principle, there was a very practical reason which faulted my sister’s good intentions to elevate me: Maria has always been a bit of a tomboy. From very early on to present, she’s exercised a rather strong will (otherwise known as pig-headedness) paired up with a hardliner manner of handling things. Had she been something else than a human, she’d make a great bullock! Or a great oak tree with healthy strong roots standing proud and tall, more willing to break than bend, if given the choice.
She was not anything you would expect in a gentle feminine nature which carries the resemblance of a whipping willow, flexing to and fro with the wind, sensitive to all its changes and moods. And just like in the case of a willow, a woman’s greatest weakness becomes her greatest strength: the despondency to give in to love, the resilience in the face of great pain and sorrow, the incessant hope for the better and the tireless work to achieve it by skilfully combining intuition, belief, and unconditional support for their loved ones.
I’ve got to admit that in those early years Maria stood out for me as a particularly boisterous tomboy, whose bossy nature was only equaled by her intuition, which made her ten times more dangerous.
A born leader, without a doubt, Maria was but last in a long string of strong women in the family, very much like my mom and other sisters. Even so, Maria was in a class of her own. The inner strength she displayed stood on an equal footing with the strongest man’s, any day. As siblings, we were all different, but similar: like the fingers of one hand which stem out of the same palm, but grow into different shapes and sizes. When called upon, we would all come together like the fingers of one hand scrunched up to make a fist, and in doing so we always had the acknowledgement that we were alike more than we were different: brothers and sisters of the same mother and father. This belief has stayed with me until this day.
Going back to my relationship with Maria, things went from bad to worse: despite her determination to make a brilliant student out of me, her patience would soon run short. As a more seasoned student, Maria knew the information backwards and every single time she tutored me she missed no opportunity to discipline me with a slap over the head at the slightest sign of distraction on my part.
But I wasn’t one to stand for it, either. I thought of myself as an almost grown-up man who had already taken on a lot of responsibilities within the household: I single-handedly ran the maintenance and grooming of all the animals on the farm. She might have been my older sister, but that alone wouldn’t give her the authority to treat me like dirt.
That would usually be the point at which all hell broke loose. Our poor cats would run for their lives trying to hide out of sight, bringing down pots and pans in their way, while the dog tied up at the back of the garden would take refuge in its kennel, in protest to our brotherly war. In other words, the cats and the dog in our household wouldn’t hold each other sworn enemies the way we did!
As for my poor mom, I honestly don’t know how she would put up with us during that time! We were at each other’s throat all the time and the reason for it was often a silly one. I had decided in my mind that Maria wanted me trained as an obedient lap dog, and the thought of it made me wild with rage.
As time went by, our many quarrels and fights deepened the gap between us and we really got to the point where we couldn’t see eye to eye over a