Film

Romulus, My Father

by Nick Prescott •

July–August 2007, no. 293

Film

Romulus, My Father

by Nick Prescott •

July–August 2007, no. 293

When Raimond Gaita’s memoir Romulus, My Father was published in 1998, the acclaim with which it was greeted was ubiquitous. The book was significant not simply because it was a strikingly revealing personal narrative written by a renowned philosopher, but because it managed to present a story that contained large doses of personal tragedy without rendering the experience of reading it either falsely uplifting or overwhelmingly depressing. While offering vivid portraits of an inconstant, depressive wife and mother, and a self-possessed husband and father struggling with his own sense of self-worth, Romulus, My Father celebrated the power of love and friendship in the most subtle, telling and deeply humane ways.

Nick Prescott

Nick Prescott studied Literature, Film and Drama as an undergraduate, and has been working in those areas ever since. Nick wrote his PhD on American authors Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, and has an ongoing fascination with contemporary and postmodern literature. Teaching full-time in the Humanities since 2005, Nick is Coordinator of the Bachelor of Creative Arts at Flinders University, teaches the core topics in these degrees, and frequently delivers lectures on French Cinema for his colleagues in Languages. Nick is a weekly film reviewer for the ABC, was on the Adelaide Writers' Week Committee for a decade, and has written on both literature and the cinema for numerous publications both in Australia and overseas.