The Triggers of Memory

 

It took me around one year and a half to finally finish In Memory of Memory by Russian poet and journalist Maria Stepanova - read in the German translation from Russian by Olga Radetzkaya as Nach dem Gedächtnis. 

As a historian and gatherer of stories, I am fascinated about memory. How it appears, how it is changed, how we change it or forget about it. My extremely slow reading in this case was due to the fact that, as I love to enjoy every drop of an old red wine, I also offer myself once in a while the luxury of reading slow, as slow as possible, in order to understand and savor the flavours of a book. 

Stepanova comes from a Russian Jewish family where she grew up, as she shared during an online talk on the occasion of the Toronto International Festival of Authors late in 2021, being told family stories instead of fairy tales. The story, that later will be shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, is an exercise in investigating the various memory layers. Hers, of her family, of her distant or closer relatives.

We live surrounded by memories: ours, of other people and times, of other historical moments that we inherited genetically or through the stories we were told about. Nowadays we store an impressive amount of memories through our devices and the production of photos that can surround us in our homes comes easier at hand. But as when our knowledge expands the certitudes vanish, But this also means that our inspiration to tell stories is as big as the chances to accurately rebuilt those memories.

Stepanova´s inquiry are lead by authentic curiosity and she is approaching every piece of memory - either physical or emotional - with care and highest attention. There is a flow of memories that may be spontaneous, but their setting is made following a desire to order and re-order.

As I am embarking soon on a mission that was supposed already to happen last year: re-lecture of Proust´s In Search of Lost Time, the moment of finally reading the last page of Stepanova´s In Memory of Memory created a momentum that I hope to maintain in the next 2 months I dedicate to one of the books that is definitely intertwined with my own coming at terms with post-teen years, without necessarily influencing it, but just as part of my background. For bookish lives, books do also build their own memories within their living realm of the memory.

Rating: 5 stars