Category: Fiction
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN-13:9780143113409
Pub. Date: June 2008
Date Read: August 2008
“Looking back at the pages of my diary, I seem to have written nothing. Looking back at the days of my life, I seem to have gone nowhere. What keeps me awake at night is the terror of slipping through my whole life in this way: tracelessly, pointlessly.”
After James suffers a fall on the stairs he ends up with a broken leg and with the realization that he doesn't remember years of his life. Three years to be exact, seem to have just disappeared.
In the meantime, his relationship with Ingrid, his Dutch girlfriend, is on the rocks and finally James decides he should write his memoirs. He feels euphoric and with hope that he'll uncover what he can't remember.
As the story unfolds, James decides it is best to go back to England. There he'll find that life starts to fall into place when he finds a job and housing. And, all the while those bits are leading him to some answers. Answers that seem to be found in the remnants of a nineteenth-century manuscript.
I appreciated how James would have conversations with a man who believes he is the poet Philip Larkin, and how he tries to read the works of Borges and make some sense of his life. How can you not enjoy a character searching for answers in works of literature?
While I thought the author put together a very clever tale filled with multiple narrators and layers, I found the story a bit slow paced. I expected a more traditional mystery and in the end this seemed to be more of a psychological study and/or an essay on memories.