A return to Chejfec and his wandering narrators. This novel, like Chejfecs others, centers on the thoughts and memories of a perambulating narrator, although the duty of narration seems to be shared with (presumably) memory itself in certain scenes, denoted by italics. The prose seems melancholy as always - this is perhaps unavoidable when contending with memory, one of the most fragile, delicate, and at once both marvelous and tragic aspects of our existence - leaving one to imagine the perambulating narrator looking out at the sensory world and looking inward to the illusory reality of memories with a somber expression.

A somber expression quite deserved, since the cause for the narrator's wonderings centers on the disappearance of a friend, known as M, who was kidnapped amidst political turmoil in Buenos Aires, and who the narrator imagines dies in an explosion occurring early in the narrative. Distance figures heavily in the narrator's musings. It is distance which gives a journey its purpose. It is distance which makes the arrival worthwhile. It is distance which allows the images of one's past to flower from the soil of memory.

Distance and distance alone is the paramount condition for the very existence of the narrative: Without M's disappearance and supposed death - without the enigma of his absence; his distance from his friend like the unfathomable and immeasurable distance of one planet from another - there would be no occasion for the existence of the text.

"The truth is, there comes a time when the recovery of memories becomes a path riddled with obstacles." Our memories form a sort of narrative of our lives, and we make sense of our experience and piece each fragmentary memory of our life into the grand mosaic through stories, through retellings and recollections of moments long or recently past. It is with some despair that we might recognize these records as a sort of fiction since they are of doubtful authorship, and since their authenticity remains indisputably in question; since we cannot trust memory to serve as an objective record of experience. But we may enjoy our memories as a sort of lived fiction, each of them pieced together like pearls on a fraying string, or pieced across multiple lengths of thread like vignettes, like chapters of the life of a character bearing a name identical to our own. This is what I believe The Planets means to emphasize: A return to what has passed, a return to memory as an attempt to make sense of the chaos and indeterminacy of the present; an encounter with the fiction of a life lived and still living.