This is a full length novel which is part mystery and part mediation on ageing and identity. It is set in a residential home where a former journalist now in her 98th year is being visited by a young university student who is a volunteer on a reminiscence project. He becomes drawn into her view on the events of the previous century becoming obsessed by a memory she has of something she saw 90 years before. Did she witness a murder? The book cover blurb I feel gives a good account of the nature of the work.
Blurb
Memories are tricky things. You can’t really trust them. Things only get even worse as you get older.
What if the memory is of something that happened more than ninety years ago? When does a memory that won’t leave you alone become a haunting?
The young volunteer on a reminiscence project is slowly drawn into the ever changing and uncertain world of the woman he visits.
At first he is fascinated by the quirky and quixotic view of the previous century seen through the eyes of this former journalist who is becoming bewilderingly preoccupied with questions about what consciousness and self are and the role that memory might play. He has to work hard to keep up with the peppering of lucid episodes that have abandoned any sense of linearity in time. Slowly her concern with what she thought she saw becomes his obsession, gradually submerging him in her world till neither of them is any longer sure if he is from her past or present, is a fiction or an aspect of a psychosis.
You can’t turn off memories as you can a life-support machine.
Nearly a century of experiences collide then ricochet around the decaying and reforming landscapes of her memory, a kaleidoscope that she cannot take from her eye. A conspiracy of dreams, reality and imaginings that have lost any sense of boundary.
The synopsis of a dream is another dream, of a scream another scream.
She once wrote ‘Death makes everything else too late except justice’. It’s just that now, some days she can’t remember writing that.
Genre: FICTION / Literary
Whilst praised by acquaintances and colleagues, including those unafarid to be critical, this work has yet to be reviewed on Amazon.
She sat in the Garden of Lost Remembering and wondered why she was crying? She could not quite recollect how long she had been here or even if it was still light when she arrived. What she knew was that something was not quite right – not just as it should be. She only had a sense of this but a powerful one. What’s the name of that sense? You know the one – not seeing and hearing – or the other one – touch. There must be more – there’s seeing, hearing, touch – there are more – I know there are - smell that’s it – so how many are there – silly woman - ‘sixth’, that’s the one I’m looking for – she had a sixth sense that all was not right – so what’s the other one – the other ordinary sense – taste that’s it - a bit like smell – is that a sense? It must be – we talk about a sense of taste. Mind you food doesn’t taste of much anymore. So what is it that’s not right? There is something – something she knew she had to do - something really important. But what is it? She had a compelling feeling that it should be done – must be completed. One last thing to do.
Memory ought to be a sense – it’s the one that lets all the others work. Isn’t it? A sense of something or is that a scent. Maybe that’s what memory is, a symphony of the senses, a tune that lingers long after the performance. Something you can’t get out of your head.
Someone had said something. She was sure of that. How can you be sure of anything when you can’t always remember? What if there comes a time when belief begins to compete with accuracy for ascendancy. Maybe it always has. What does that do to your sense of who you are?
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Italian
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Translation in progress.
Translated by Elena Colombo
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