I think to myself: You can never tell the effect of a book until it has lingered in the memory. But this is wrong: memory is not an indifferent receptacle – it works, it labours for itself, struggling against forgetting, clearing a space in the midst of forgetting. Only it never knows, memory, whether this space is real or imaginary – whether the ‘past’ it seizes is the same as the event which unfolded then or there, a long time ago or more recently.
Memory: what happens when I remember the scenes in the pages of Appelfeld’s The Age of Wonders? Of the narrator’s relationship with the domestic servant whose room he would visit as a boy – the scent of her perfume, her comforting presence in a feminine space within his home, a young woman’s space, from which she launched herself, perfumed and pomaded into the world of dates with young men? Or of the scenes in Roubaud’s Destruction (it is only the first part of the phantasmic Great Fire of London) where he comes to London to walk and to read? Of the walks through London parks with the nameless interlocutor of the narrator of Josipovici’s Moo Pak? And then of the tremendous onward roll of Bernhard’s Extinction, with its last extraordinary page - extraordinary because of its brevity given the length of what has gone before, because of the surprising resoluteness of its narrator and because, too, this was Bernhard’s last novel?
All books I have read recently, books which do not grow in the memory so much as estrange the power to remember from itself, forcing spaces, strange glades, open in the memory, but also, in those spaces, foregrounding a kind of forgetting – the darkness of the trees, the stillness of the lake – yes, making forgetting present and tangible. As if the glade which opened marked not just disclosure, but loss. As though it was also this loss which presented itself in those enchanted spaces which open in the memory (which open memory itself and bring it close, very close to forgetting).
I do not remember, the book remembers for me. You, book, keep a memory for me in your closed covers. That’s why I keep you, why I keep too many books, transporting them from place to place, and why I mourn those books I sold because I had too many books. You keep a place for memory, but also for forgetting, for what haunts me in your pages is something like a life I never live and could not live.
I do not forget, the book forgets for me. I saw a ghost in the glade as night fell. It was my ghost. Only it was not me I saw but another in me. One who wore my face but whose face was not mine. One who forgets for me, who bears the power, the unpower of forgetting. Reading draws me towards youth, towards a childhood which is not mine. The child: a wheel which turns upon itself, says Zarathustra, the yea-sayer, the affirmer of the world.