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A carregar... In Memory of Memory (edição 2021)por Maria Stepanova (Autor)
Informação Sobre a ObraIn Memory of Memory por Maria Stepanova
Books Read in 2022 (653) Eastern Europe (20) A carregar...
Adira ao LibraryThing para descobrir se irá gostar deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. I let "In Memory of Memory" swallow me, sing to me, break my heart and heal it again. It is a poetic journey through history, family history, philosophy, memories, sights and objects. Beautiful writing that makes even the smallest things shine. (There were poignant moments of recognition for me as well - that childhood hunger for family history, for example. There I was, with black and white squares and rectangles spread around me on the floor at grandma's house. Who is this? And this? And grandparents who did not like to talk about certain things...) I am very glad I read this. Man, I didn't like this book at all -- I had to give up after the first section. It felt like I was reading the ravings of a coked-up maniac who wanted to tell you everything that occurred to them when wandering around looking at random crap. I'm not giving it a star rating because people I respect love this book, and it was voted best book of the 2000-2020 period by a panel of Russian experts, so I figure the problem is with me, but I'm leaving this review so that if anyone else finds the book unreadable they'll know they have company. By all indications this should have been better than it is (consider the subject matter, authorial pedigree, tasteful cover art) The work is neither material 'speaking for itself' nor theoretical 'essaie', but belongs to the unhappy middleground: primary source with copious supplement of commentary/speculation. This is a genre demanded by those unsatisfied by 'unsubstantial' theory and also those bored by 'pointless' historiography. The secret of such critiques is the author cannot fulfil them - they must be overcome by effort of the reader or aid of a 'third' work. Strepanova is aware of this trap, which she has not managed to evade, hence the frequent auto-reference and near-despairing allusions to Sebald, who "captures everything". The physical document acquires a "precious" quality - think Joseph Cornell's Boxes. A more accessible analogy: one imagines a re-printing of Walter Benjamin's notes, falsely distressed, such that the object itself becomes the valued, and not its signified. This is a quality which evades inspection, yet the analysis is attempted anyway. In the first movement, the value of the object is displaced onto a signified 'history' or 'time' or 'death'. But once these qualities are investigated in the second movement, we discover the object has lost its value. So, in the third movement, we once again return to the precious object, find value without explanation, and the investigation begins again. We are drawn into a dialectical 'false infinity' (which, perhaps, is the true nature of history...). The author is well-aware of one manifestation of this process: she has disappeared completely from the 'autobiographical' text. There is no point (of this impenetrable cycle) at which she could have entered into it. It's a book that's very rich in thought, intellectual thought, archives, musings, literary and artistic references. Although it's not an easy read, I loved it and I'll probably come back to it every now and then. There's a happening in this book that you will read about in many reviews: the narrator goes to her grandfather's house for the first time, advised by an acquaintance about the address. She arrives and immediately feels at home. She tries to remember everything, like trying to pack long lost luggage that she wants to reown and never lose again. But then after the visit her acquaintance tells her they had made a mistake and had sent her to the wrong address. sem críticas | adicionar uma crítica
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"With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of an entire century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of an ordinary family that somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. The family's pursuit of a quiet, civilized, ordinary life-during such atrocious times-is itself a strange odyssey. In dialogue with thinkers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various genres-essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and history-Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers a bold exploration of cultural and personal memory."-- Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Obviously Stepanova isn’t American, and I have no idea if the same trend towards DIY ancestry has been ascendant in Russia too, but there were many times in this book I felt like I was being regaled with reams and reams of information that had no significance to anyone outside of the writer’s family. There were moments in the book where the reader is treated to insight about art or literature or history (the sections about Charlotte Salomon and the siege of Leningrad stick out for me) and these made it worth reading. But at a certain point I had a hard time keeping all the names straight on the twisting branches of the family tree. At one point late in the book, Stepanova admits that for all this writing about these dead family members, she actually took on the project for very self-conscious reasons. Actually, I’m still not clear why she wrote this book or did what must add up to years and years of research. Her reflections on topics that have some significance for the uninitiated reader are almost incidental to the stories of marriages, deaths, letters sent back and forth decades and decades ago, and for a book aimed at the public, it seems it seems that hierarchy should be flipped around. ( )