her10d's review
A little too slow and meandering for my tastes. Some beautiful writing in here though.
ngominh's review
3.0
Với một tác phẩm đậm tính hồi ký như In Memory of Memory, Maria Stepanova một cách tiên phong đã dẹp bỏ hết những điều cần kíp nhằm xây dựng nên sự “khớp nối hoàn hảo” của một cuốn sách vốn lâu nay cần nhiều bất ngờ. Thừa nhận cái bất xác tín trong ký ức và điều không may của một đời sống thiếu sự đặc biệt; nối gót Proust, Susan Sontag hay W.G. Sebald trong cơn quay quắt của những truy nguyên về lại quá khứ; tác phẩm văn xuôi đầy đặc biệt này là một hành trình tìm về thời gian từ thời Nga Hoàng đến cuộc vay hãm Leningrad; từ nạn đói đến cuộc thanh trừng Stalin; trong một ký ức dung dị, bình thản mà không đánh bóng, nhấn mạnh hay được đồ sâu. Ấn tượng và đầy sức mạnh.
Thế nhưng có một thực tế là nó quá dài, dài hơn mức cần thiết. Mình đã đặt nó xuống 2 lần trước khi hoàn thành được 1/2. Có những chương đoạn như liệt kê 18 bức ảnh ở nhà người ông chẳng có 1 dụng ý gì cả, khiến mình nhớ tới hơn 100 trang của Bolano trong 2666 miêu tả những vụ án mạng ở nơi sa mạc. Nếu tinh gọn hơn nữa đây sẽ là một tác phẩm vô cùng tiềm năng.
Thế nhưng có một thực tế là nó quá dài, dài hơn mức cần thiết. Mình đã đặt nó xuống 2 lần trước khi hoàn thành được 1/2. Có những chương đoạn như liệt kê 18 bức ảnh ở nhà người ông chẳng có 1 dụng ý gì cả, khiến mình nhớ tới hơn 100 trang của Bolano trong 2666 miêu tả những vụ án mạng ở nơi sa mạc. Nếu tinh gọn hơn nữa đây sẽ là một tác phẩm vô cùng tiềm năng.
ausma23's review
5.0
“When I began to think seriously about my memories I had the startling realization that I had nothing left.”
Stepanova’s genre-defying In Memory of Memory is at once a chronicle of her relationship with her family history; a reckoning with her identity through her ancestors and what they have left behind; a condensed retelling of 19th and 20th century Russia (described by Stepanova as a “society passing from one space of tragedy to the next as if it were a suite of rooms, a suite of traumas”); lives lived through letters sent between her relatives; and an examination of the role memory and nostalgia play in our increasingly digitized lives. It is like being led into a room with all the mementos of her ancestors, memory shrunken and transmogrified into porcelain figures. The room is magical for the history it is imbued with, and yet it is cluttered, overwhelming, so saturated it is by memory; it embodies how traumatic, emotional, and consuming remembering can be.
Though dense, the book never drags owing to Stepanova’s poetic, metaphoric language that avoids ever dipping into sentimentality. She steps outside of herself to analyze her relationship with memory in dialogue with other writers and artists who were similarly preoccupied with personal history and nostalgia (Sebald, Proust, et al), drawing incredible threads around how conflicting and contradictory self-discovery steeped in the past can be. Most fascinating to me were her discussions of how our ability to accumulate memory through physical, audiovisual, and now digital objects has only increased with inventions like musical records and films. Modern technology, too, turns nostalgia into a daily exercise in obsession, from our seemingly endless camera rolls to social media apps that, unprovoked, show us #throwbacks from one, five, ten years ago today.
Stepanova laments this excess of memory (“There is too much past,” she says simply) as well as the dearth of information that could provide insight to her family’s past. At the same time, this excess feels like a dearth in itself, perhaps because what makes any memory precious is its scarcity, both in our ability to fully replay it in our minds and in the lack of physical objects the memory may inhabit in our world. We fear losing this memory, not having access to it through any tangible thing, and how can we trust our aging brains to reliably retrieve it all our lives? She likens this to a murky lake into which people from the past are constantly slipping under, preventing us from developing concrete images of them and dimming the memories we do have. We risk romanticizing or inventing: “The desire to remember, to recreate and fix in place, goes hand in hand with incomplete knowledge and partial understanding of events.” She chides herself for having been “occupied all this time with the Freudian family romance, the sentimentalized past.” To some degree, these faces from the past and letters seem like they are you, some earlier version of yourself that has been reincarnated over and over across centuries. I recall the flicker of recognition I felt seeing a youthful photo of my mother’s uncle: the round face, high cheekbones, soft dark eyes. He looked like my uncle, and as such resembled me.
Stepanova considers also the rights of the dead and their stories, realizing that she has become possessive of them, and has even come to feel a sense of ownership over them, as though she had inherited these histories, too. But who else is memory for if not for those that remain? Is our desire to know who we came from — and not just their most basic facts, but our desire to know them as human beings — selfish, or even pathological? Is it not just a process of discovering one’s identity? She indeed seems to settle on this last point: “…The author can’t disappear into the shadows — she can’t get away from the fact that this book is about her.” Her tireless research in compiling this book is an incredible achievement purely from an anthropological standpoint. She succeeds in retrieving her family from those murky waters, making them real not only to herself, but to the reader, rendering them in such detail that they feel genuinely familiar. She comes as close as ever to doing the impossible: making the dead alive again.
Stepanova’s genre-defying In Memory of Memory is at once a chronicle of her relationship with her family history; a reckoning with her identity through her ancestors and what they have left behind; a condensed retelling of 19th and 20th century Russia (described by Stepanova as a “society passing from one space of tragedy to the next as if it were a suite of rooms, a suite of traumas”); lives lived through letters sent between her relatives; and an examination of the role memory and nostalgia play in our increasingly digitized lives. It is like being led into a room with all the mementos of her ancestors, memory shrunken and transmogrified into porcelain figures. The room is magical for the history it is imbued with, and yet it is cluttered, overwhelming, so saturated it is by memory; it embodies how traumatic, emotional, and consuming remembering can be.
Though dense, the book never drags owing to Stepanova’s poetic, metaphoric language that avoids ever dipping into sentimentality. She steps outside of herself to analyze her relationship with memory in dialogue with other writers and artists who were similarly preoccupied with personal history and nostalgia (Sebald, Proust, et al), drawing incredible threads around how conflicting and contradictory self-discovery steeped in the past can be. Most fascinating to me were her discussions of how our ability to accumulate memory through physical, audiovisual, and now digital objects has only increased with inventions like musical records and films. Modern technology, too, turns nostalgia into a daily exercise in obsession, from our seemingly endless camera rolls to social media apps that, unprovoked, show us #throwbacks from one, five, ten years ago today.
Stepanova laments this excess of memory (“There is too much past,” she says simply) as well as the dearth of information that could provide insight to her family’s past. At the same time, this excess feels like a dearth in itself, perhaps because what makes any memory precious is its scarcity, both in our ability to fully replay it in our minds and in the lack of physical objects the memory may inhabit in our world. We fear losing this memory, not having access to it through any tangible thing, and how can we trust our aging brains to reliably retrieve it all our lives? She likens this to a murky lake into which people from the past are constantly slipping under, preventing us from developing concrete images of them and dimming the memories we do have. We risk romanticizing or inventing: “The desire to remember, to recreate and fix in place, goes hand in hand with incomplete knowledge and partial understanding of events.” She chides herself for having been “occupied all this time with the Freudian family romance, the sentimentalized past.” To some degree, these faces from the past and letters seem like they are you, some earlier version of yourself that has been reincarnated over and over across centuries. I recall the flicker of recognition I felt seeing a youthful photo of my mother’s uncle: the round face, high cheekbones, soft dark eyes. He looked like my uncle, and as such resembled me.
Stepanova considers also the rights of the dead and their stories, realizing that she has become possessive of them, and has even come to feel a sense of ownership over them, as though she had inherited these histories, too. But who else is memory for if not for those that remain? Is our desire to know who we came from — and not just their most basic facts, but our desire to know them as human beings — selfish, or even pathological? Is it not just a process of discovering one’s identity? She indeed seems to settle on this last point: “…The author can’t disappear into the shadows — she can’t get away from the fact that this book is about her.” Her tireless research in compiling this book is an incredible achievement purely from an anthropological standpoint. She succeeds in retrieving her family from those murky waters, making them real not only to herself, but to the reader, rendering them in such detail that they feel genuinely familiar. She comes as close as ever to doing the impossible: making the dead alive again.
lokster71's review against another edition
5.0
I fear I may struggle to do this book justice. There is so much in it. I believe the literary term would be 'thickness'. But this is a book that pulls you in. Maria Stepanova is a Russian poet. This is the story of her family. Her memoir.
There is part of you that thinks this will be a book filled with horrors. This is, after all, the story of a family of Russian Jews living through a time of totalitarianism and mass murder. Yet, Stepanova's family seems to have been touched by these things tangentially (or the family has edited its own history to forget some of the darker parts.) They survived. They survived pogroms, they survived revolution, they survived wars, and they survived Stalin. Mostly. And yet all these things are part of the book. If you have an interest in modern history this is a book worth reading. As she says:
"Everyone else’s ancestors had taken part in history, but mine seemed to have been mere lodgers in history’s house."
But the book is more than just a memoir:
"This book about my family is not about my family at all, but something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me."
Stepanova talks about how we interact with the past and how we treat the dead. If you're a historian you should read this book. It will make you think about what the past is and how we pull it into the present.
The book meanders and digresses, which I like. It feels a bit Proustian. Or Sebaldian. Stepanova draws in cultural figures, books and music. There is part of me that thinks this is a book that no English person could ever write. Perhaps I'm wrong? This is a book with a European perspective, which - much as I consider myself a European - is different to the British perspective. The history is different so the experiences are different. Which is another reason to read it.
This was the final book in the International Booker Prize Shortlist for 2021. They have all been good reads. This though was my favourite. It is the longest of the six books. It is the one that takes the most time to read. Is it too long? No. I don't think so. The time invested is part of the pleasure in my opinion. We rush too many things in 2021. Sometimes things need to be savoured.
As I said, I fear I haven't done this book justice. The only thing I can suggest is you read it and decide for yourself.
There is part of you that thinks this will be a book filled with horrors. This is, after all, the story of a family of Russian Jews living through a time of totalitarianism and mass murder. Yet, Stepanova's family seems to have been touched by these things tangentially (or the family has edited its own history to forget some of the darker parts.) They survived. They survived pogroms, they survived revolution, they survived wars, and they survived Stalin. Mostly. And yet all these things are part of the book. If you have an interest in modern history this is a book worth reading. As she says:
"Everyone else’s ancestors had taken part in history, but mine seemed to have been mere lodgers in history’s house."
But the book is more than just a memoir:
"This book about my family is not about my family at all, but something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me."
Stepanova talks about how we interact with the past and how we treat the dead. If you're a historian you should read this book. It will make you think about what the past is and how we pull it into the present.
The book meanders and digresses, which I like. It feels a bit Proustian. Or Sebaldian. Stepanova draws in cultural figures, books and music. There is part of me that thinks this is a book that no English person could ever write. Perhaps I'm wrong? This is a book with a European perspective, which - much as I consider myself a European - is different to the British perspective. The history is different so the experiences are different. Which is another reason to read it.
This was the final book in the International Booker Prize Shortlist for 2021. They have all been good reads. This though was my favourite. It is the longest of the six books. It is the one that takes the most time to read. Is it too long? No. I don't think so. The time invested is part of the pleasure in my opinion. We rush too many things in 2021. Sometimes things need to be savoured.
As I said, I fear I haven't done this book justice. The only thing I can suggest is you read it and decide for yourself.
ellskal's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.5
What can I even say about it. I mean sure it maybe could have been condensed a little (not sure it needed the full 500 pgs) but honestly who am I to say when works of art (and this is totally a work of art) should be shortened for "easy viewing" - it may not be as accessible but my god is this book beautiful in its entirety. The format was so engaging with some really complect intresting ideas being discussed. It was so personal and informative and expressive and emotional it was a beautiful blend. The fact that it's a translated work astounds me all the langauge is so beautiful and poetic (I read transcripts of interviews with the translator about her process and it gave me so much hope). Would not be at all surprised if this becomes a future classic