Volume 54, Number 12 · July 19, 2007
Lest We Forget
By Joyce Carol Oates
The Raw Shark Texts
by Steven Hall
Cannongate, 428 pp., $24.00
Remainder
by Tom McCarthy
Vintage, 308 pp., $13.95 (paper)
Austerlitz
by W.G. Sebald, translated from the German by Anthea Bell
Modern Library, 298 pp., $13.95 (paper)
The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology
edited by Jonathan Lethem
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 414 pp., $14.00 (paper)
Like the future, amnesia has become a crowded literary terrain. Rare in life, amnesia abounds in contemporary literature and in the most stylish contemporary movies (see Christopher Nolan's ingeniously contrived Memento, in which a man suffering from amnesia is forced to write notes to his 'future' self to enable him to 'remember'). The attraction of waking not to the usual flood of memories and associations like dirty dishwater but to a tabula rasa of infinite possibility is obvious, especially in a debased political/cultural era: amnesia is 'a floating metaphor,' as Jonathan Lethem says in his introduction to The Vintage Book of Amnesia, 'very much in the air.'
Review, 5252 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |