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Shadow of Memory
The debut novel of Bernard Comment, acclaimed author and editor, now available in English for the first time, The Shadow of Memory brings a fairy-tale premise into the modern world, where information--and its loss--can be a matter of life and death.
214 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 13, 2013
Although it's not crucial to this book, "The Shadow of Memory" is a good example of how visual art is abused in "literary" novels. The opening chapters are about Pontormo's late frescoes for San Lorenzo, which survive only as drawings. The narrator and an older man have both read about them, and the drawings are used in conversation as examples of astonishing acts of imagination. I am allergic to almost all appearances of fine art in novels, for three reasons: first, paintings in particular tend to be used to register a kind of reverence for high culture; second, the art is often inexactly conjured, so it exists more as an idea of something wonderful than an image in the reader's mind; and third, descriptions tend to be dependent on second-hand and popularized accounts in art history textbooks and museum guides.
If, as a reader, you do not already know about Pontormo's lost frescoes, then the descriptions in these pages can't be much more than abstract and dry. If, on the other hand, you do know, then these descriptions are loose, full of clichés, and inadequate to their subject matter. It follows that the pages in this book devoted to Pontormo (and later, to Brunelleschi and others) are for people who have a glancing acquaintance with the art, and a reverence that comes from visits to museums and time spent in college classrooms. This kind of foggy adulation and unwitting repetition of popular ideas is a commonplace in novels that include visual art. In this novel, Pontormo serves mainly to show that the narrator and his friend are in possession of supposedly arcane knowledge (they read "manuscripts" in the Bibliotheque Nationale), outside the world of middle-class values.
The only novel about fine art that I know that escapes this is Thomas Bernhard's "Old Masters": in that book the narrator doesn't really even like the one painting that he has gone to see nearly every day of his adult life: it's just the only thing in the world that is more or less tolerable to him. Removing the adulation removes the problem of the worship of erudition; removing the need to describe the artwork (which is a relatively unimportant Tintoretto portrait) takes away the problem of descriptions so vague that the works fail to be clearly present in the text; and removing the interest in the work's value lets Bernhard avoid repeating information in art history textbooks.
Most of Comment's book isn't about visual art, but the painting and architecture are parts of Comment's dream of perfect erudition. In that respect "The Shadow of Memory" is a muddled mixture of Canetti, Bernhard, and Sartre (especially the autodidact in "Nausea," and the tutor in "The Words"). There are several possibilities: the book might be a novel of ideas (in this case, about how people possess memory, what kinds of memory people can have, whether memory can be learned, whether its loss can be slowed), or perhaps a psychological thriller, or a character study (the narrator and the compulsive, unpleasant old man he befriends), or a genre novel (because the book's publicity materials make it sound as if the narrator enters into a magical Faustian bargain to possess a memory).
I found the book unconvincing as a drama, as a description of character, and as a representation of memory. The narrator says he has a memory disorder, and wants to acquire a memory: but even in the first few pages, it isn't at all clear what makes him different from anyone else. At some point the reader realizes that the narrator doesn't have a memory disorder of the sort he claims, but rather a kind of dementia. Comment himself seems never to have decided what place tension and narrative drive play in the narrator's interactions with the older man: it's as if Comment hoped to mingle a novel of ideas with a psychological thriller.
In the end, the book poses itself mainly as a novel of ideas: but the notions of memory, its loss, and the ways it might be kept are inconsistently imagined. I am not convinced Comment himself has a clear idea of what memory means in this novel, how people might possess different sorts of memory, or what it might feel like to have those allegedly different kinds of memory. I'm not convinced he has thought through the ways that his genre-novel premise, the pages that develop his characters, the passages used to create the sort of tension that is expected in psychological thrillers, the devotion to what is taken as high culture and vast learning, the Bernhard-style rants against the bourgeoisie, and the scattered pieces of theories of memory, might possibly come together into a novel.
If, as a reader, you do not already know about Pontormo's lost frescoes, then the descriptions in these pages can't be much more than abstract and dry. If, on the other hand, you do know, then these descriptions are loose, full of clichés, and inadequate to their subject matter. It follows that the pages in this book devoted to Pontormo (and later, to Brunelleschi and others) are for people who have a glancing acquaintance with the art, and a reverence that comes from visits to museums and time spent in college classrooms. This kind of foggy adulation and unwitting repetition of popular ideas is a commonplace in novels that include visual art. In this novel, Pontormo serves mainly to show that the narrator and his friend are in possession of supposedly arcane knowledge (they read "manuscripts" in the Bibliotheque Nationale), outside the world of middle-class values.
The only novel about fine art that I know that escapes this is Thomas Bernhard's "Old Masters": in that book the narrator doesn't really even like the one painting that he has gone to see nearly every day of his adult life: it's just the only thing in the world that is more or less tolerable to him. Removing the adulation removes the problem of the worship of erudition; removing the need to describe the artwork (which is a relatively unimportant Tintoretto portrait) takes away the problem of descriptions so vague that the works fail to be clearly present in the text; and removing the interest in the work's value lets Bernhard avoid repeating information in art history textbooks.
Most of Comment's book isn't about visual art, but the painting and architecture are parts of Comment's dream of perfect erudition. In that respect "The Shadow of Memory" is a muddled mixture of Canetti, Bernhard, and Sartre (especially the autodidact in "Nausea," and the tutor in "The Words"). There are several possibilities: the book might be a novel of ideas (in this case, about how people possess memory, what kinds of memory people can have, whether memory can be learned, whether its loss can be slowed), or perhaps a psychological thriller, or a character study (the narrator and the compulsive, unpleasant old man he befriends), or a genre novel (because the book's publicity materials make it sound as if the narrator enters into a magical Faustian bargain to possess a memory).
I found the book unconvincing as a drama, as a description of character, and as a representation of memory. The narrator says he has a memory disorder, and wants to acquire a memory: but even in the first few pages, it isn't at all clear what makes him different from anyone else. At some point the reader realizes that the narrator doesn't have a memory disorder of the sort he claims, but rather a kind of dementia. Comment himself seems never to have decided what place tension and narrative drive play in the narrator's interactions with the older man: it's as if Comment hoped to mingle a novel of ideas with a psychological thriller.
In the end, the book poses itself mainly as a novel of ideas: but the notions of memory, its loss, and the ways it might be kept are inconsistently imagined. I am not convinced Comment himself has a clear idea of what memory means in this novel, how people might possess different sorts of memory, or what it might feel like to have those allegedly different kinds of memory. I'm not convinced he has thought through the ways that his genre-novel premise, the pages that develop his characters, the passages used to create the sort of tension that is expected in psychological thrillers, the devotion to what is taken as high culture and vast learning, the Bernhard-style rants against the bourgeoisie, and the scattered pieces of theories of memory, might possibly come together into a novel.
September 8, 2020
A strange narrative, macabre and funny in different measures, but also maddening. Redeemed by its relative brevity, the story is of a young man who has trouble remembering things and by chance meets up with a domineering old man whose astonishing memory is only surpassed by his hoarding and his self-confidence. The young man steadily falls further and further under the old man's--Robert's--sway, until he has left his lively lover Mattilda and moved in as a caretaker and amanuensis in exchange for the bizarre promise that he will get to inherit Robert's memory. About two-thirds through the book the narrative shifts from a general first-person account to a series of journal articles, and the story culminates in an ending that is as inevitable as it is pathetic. The main character is annoying at best, infuriating at worst, so if you opt for this odd little novel I would suggest mentally filing it under the category of black comedy, which is the most charitable classification for it I would say.
July 30, 2018
Swiss literature is new to me and somewhat similar to what I have read by a Dutch author in the confession genre. No doubt it would resonate with some, just not me. There are many more titles available in the Swiss literature series.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews