Manaus memories
MEMORY is a well-established theme in contemporary Latin American fiction, and perhaps the primary obsession of its finest exponents. From Rayuela by Julio Cortázar, to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, to The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa, the reconstruction of the past is a duty forced on those who have reason to question their individual and collective identities and doubt the veracity of the histories passed to them by others. But a more Proustian motive underlies Milton Hatoum's exploration of memory in this story of a childhood spent in the Amazonian port of Manaus. As the unnamed narrator tells us at the outset: "Life truly begins with a memory". This, the novel postulates, is as absolutely true for adults as it is for newly conscious infants — and yet memory also brings with it the darkness of mortality and an unearthly sense of communing with others beyond the present.
In some respects, the colour and clamour of life in a Lebanese household in the 1950s is as exuberant as García Márquez's early stories of tropical dynasties and domestic intrigue. We taste the baklava and esfiha pastries, we hear the Koran in Portuguese-tainted Arabic and we join the hordes of children when they shelter under the jambo tree. But such is the weight of remembrance — and Hatoun's narrative feels like the dredging of memory — that all the details are subsumed into a somewhat amorphous aesthetic whole. Memory is described as a "tempestuous sea" but, here, that sea is murky and slow-moving, with unseen but powerful currents hidden in its depths. At the centre of the novel is the Amazon itself, a mysterious river fed by countless, untraceable sources, always shifting, too monstrous and labyrinthine to be comprehended.
Flitting between the more reflective present and recent past, and the lively, but often tense scenes of fifty years ago, with few rhetorical clues to these time changes or to the movement between dialogue, exposition and recollection, this is a dense, occasionally bewildering novel. Similarly, though the narrator ostensibly focuses her attention on Emilie, her dying grandmother who was once the matriarch of a large extended family of Levantine immigrants, we never fully know her. Throughout, character is never nearly as powerful as perception, and nothing unifies the disparate identities and fragments of narrative so much as memory — and the lyrical tone of memory — itself. Personality is never allowed to emerge fully, as if to give a clear definition of any individual would be to veer towards caricature; place is so intensely experienced that it is at times invisible, as if senses and their stimuli were fused into one.
Although Tale of a Certain Orient is a challenging book, it is worth bearing with, and allowing it to lead you down the meandering tributaries of the narrator's subconscious. For Hatoum skilfully evokes a realistic encounter between East and West. Through the measured recording of tiny details, through the accretion of moments of consolation, through brief epiphanies and scraps of sense amid the plotless lives of these New World settlers, we learn that no single moment defines a life. It is unrelieved experience and relentless sensation that truly define a person and provide the indices of an individual destiny. Milton Hatoum's masterstroke is to portray a few days in one life through which we observe the crises of displacement and the suffering of generations.
Tale of a Certain Orient, Milton Hatoum, translated by Ellen Watson and John Gledson, Bloomsbury, p.212, £14.99. 0 7475 6906 1
© The Times Literary Supplement
CHRIS MOSS
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
