4,25⭐️

*Book Club Read*

"When does the everyday become history?"

That book was a journey.

I wasn't sure how to approach it when I begun reading, but it immediately dragged me under a flow of concepts and storylines that delved into memory loss and identity loss. The value of remembering and how much it builds one person's sense of self.

Although it starts as a difficult-to-define genre, the shift to a dystopian story anchored it as a potential future that explores different pasts. The fear and danger of forgetting at the beginning are a mirror of the fear and danger provoked by the glorification of the past at the end.

Two literary tools were particularly brilliant: the character names and the narrator's role.

The first line we encounter tells us that "all real persons in this novel are fictional, only the fictional are real." It's written with all historical (fictionalised) characters being named while all fictional characters have only a letter, or a nickname, such as K., Mr N. etc. The only characters who are named are Emma (although mistaken at some point with a bird called Emma Bovary) and Gaustine. Gaustine itself is a nickname for Augustin Garibaldi, a fictional character not just for the novel but also in the narrator's mind.

The second aspect I found amazing was to slowly hint that the narrator was losing his memory, losing his ability to write, to recognise faces, to remember anything except a few bits and pieces that his mind may or may not have made up. The last part of the book goes in reverse chronology with the last scene from the narrator's perspective being his earliest and last memory as a 3yo. The narrator tells the story from a first person point of view, switches to third person for a short moment, then back at the first person point of view. 

He goes from being the narrator of the story, to being another character of the story, to becoming the story itself.

It was a brilliantly written book that I'm very glad I discovered it through the Book Club.