Marina Jarre, who died aged 90 in 2016, was an Italian novelist and short-story writer. At least, she made her home in Italy and wrote in Italian: her father, she reveals in this memoir, was a Latvian Russian Jew who was shot by the Nazis in 1941, and Jarre spent her first ten years in Riga, speaking German. Her mother’s people, with whom Jarre lived from the ages of 10 to 20, after her parents divorced, were French-speaking Waldensians from the mountain town of Torre Pellice, southwest of Turin (the Waldensians, 12th-century ascetics, were persecuted by the Catholic Church and absorbed themselves, after the Reformation, into Protestantism). It’s a complex and disorientating heritage, to put it mildly, and Distant Fathers, first published in 1987 but only now available in English, is a complex and disorientating memoir.

Recognising that Jarre is tough going, the publishers have provided not one but two introductory essays, by the translator Ann Goldstein (also the translator of Elena Ferrante), and the Italian writer Marta Barone. The book is then divided into three parts. In the first, written in the present tense, Jarre returns to her Latvian childhood with her glamorous father, whom she saw for the last time when she was 12 and whose fate she did not discover until the 1950s. “His death remained inside my life like a hidden seed, and gradually, as I lived and aged, it grew in my memory, not unlike a longtime love.”

In the second section, written in the past tense, she recalls her exile to fascist Italy in 1935 to live with her grandparents. It was now, Jarre says, that “time entered my life”. She now understood not only that she had her own brief past, but that she belonged to the ancient Waldensian tradition and was also part of a historical continuum. “The war and the partisan struggle were part of my days not unlike the smell of the winter air and the sound of barking dogs on dark November evenings.” In the third section we learn about her unhappy marriage, her experience of motherhood – “as a woman I had to be born from myself, I gave birth to myself along with my children” – and her experience of ageing.

I do not mean to suggest that the memoir has a strict timeline: within each of these sections Jarre eschews chronology, oscillating instead between memories, allusions, impressions, quotations from diaries, insights, dreams and historical events. Occupying, at each stage, the consciousness of her earlier incarnations, she notes for example the horror of her childhood realisation that “I, too, will become an adult, but I can’t picture it to myself. It worries me – and I think about it often – that I will grow up suddenly in a single night. How will I manage to find clothes the correct length?” Similarly, she records her recognition as a teenager that “I am afraid of the woman I am about to become.”

Despite her many startling sentences, the overall effect of Jarre’s prose style is of being lost in a fog. For page after page we have no idea what is going on, and this is intentional: Jarre’s purpose is to replicate in writing the effect of living between lands and languages at a time of historical upheaval. Her subject is language rather than herself, or rather herself in language. “In every language I was different,” she says. “Every language has its time.” It is through language instead of events or relationships that she reads the world. “I remember clearly when I understood that words placed in a certain order… were beautiful.” Jarre similarly remembers seeing her mother’s handwriting, and realising that she had “a more intimate relation with her writing than with her”.

The reader, however, does not have an intimate relationship with Jarre or her writing. It is unusual for a memoirist to resist bonding with their audience, but Jarre does not want our friendship or pity. Whenever we start to warm to her, she warns us off – telling us at one point that as teenager she was paid by bereaved parents to tend to the grave of their child, but spent the money on herself instead. It is not the “fathers” who are “distant” in this chilly book, but the mysterious author herself.

Distant Fathers is published by Head of Zeus at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop