confabulate (kənˈfæbjʊˌleɪt)
— vb
1. to talk together; converse; chat.
2. psychiatry to replace the gaps left by a disorder of the memory with imaginary remembered experiences consistently believed to be true.
As The Confabulist opens, the aging Martin Strauss meets with a doctor who explains that Strauss is in the process of losing his mind: while he will continue to perform all of his normal functions, his memories will disappear and be replaced with imaginary ones. This is a doubly interesting condition to affect him since memories and guilt have plagued Strauss his entire adult life, because as he reveals right away, he's the man who killed Harry Houdini. Twice. As he meets with Houdini's daughter Alice, Strauss is compelled to unburden himself of his past; to apologise for depriving her of a father.
The book timeshifts between Strauss on the day of the diagnosis, the history of Houdini, Strauss' early days, the fateful meeting where Strauss suckerpunched the great magician, and Strauss' subsequent years. In addition to all of these shifts, each section usually had two time frames: one present action and a related memory that shifted back and forth. This might sound confusing, but it worked since (as the title suggests) the nature of memory is a major theme of The Confabulist:
In a magic trick, the things you don't see or think you see have a culmination, because at the end of the trick there's an effect. Misdirection tampers with reconstruction. But if life works the same way, and I believe it does, then a percentage of our lives is fiction. There's no way to know whether anything we've experienced is real or imagined.Much of the Houdini information was interesting and the excitement was ratcheted up with spies and death threats, the debunking of powerful spiritualists, and a philosophical feud with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Strauss sections worked less well for me -- this unreliable narrator didn't do too much, and in the end, can never even explain what compelled him to throw that punch (and if Steven Galloway is going to use this real person's infamy in a work of fiction, I think he owes it to the man to at least construct a reasonable motivation).
Much of the philosophising about memory (and there is a lot of it) was a bit vague to me and I think that this book will be interesting to readers to the extent this they find this bit near the end insightful:
We think that our minds are like a library -- the right book is there somewhere if you can find it. A whole story will then unfold with you as the narrator. But our memory changes, evolves, erases. Moments disappear and are replaced and combined. What's left of a person after they're gone is a spirit of who and what they were.On the other hand, there were many passages that I did find well-written and evocative, and these are just a couple of examples:
This is where our pain comes from. Because we know this is going to happen. We feel it and it underwrites our mourning.
For all of us the future is an unmade promise. For the living there is the present and the past. The past is always moving, always changing, as the people we lose are transformed in us. The past is no place to live. But it's the only place the dead lived.
Darkness has a way of making everything louder. There's no way to identify the sounds coming at you. You can imagine what they are, but it's always a guess, based on what you remember about the world before the light went out of it.And:
He'd always thought a theatre felt strange without people in it. With its seats empty, its lights up, and its air still, it reminded him of a dead body.I remember enjoying The Cellist of Sarajevo, and most especially for the research -- just as I thought Galloway did a masterful job of evoking the terrible siege of that city, I think that he excels here in bringing Harry Houdini to life and making him even larger than the known legend by adding fictional elements to his life's work. Where both books fall short is in inducing empathy for the purely fictional characters, and since I didn't really care about Martin Strauss in The Confabulist (or the sniper in The Cellist for that matter), it became a less than perfect reading experience. *spoilerish* And I can't imagine most people wouldn't see the twist ending coming, but perhaps like an audience member looking for smoke and mirrors, I ruined that for myself by not submitting to the misdirection.
Do we ever really get over the things that our parents do to us? There was no grand cataclysm that marked my childhood, but the sum total of it left an echo that is still here. My mother was everything gentle. She made things better, she fixed what went wrong, and she remains what I conjure when I think of goodness.
My father was not a villain, though he did villainous things. He was cold, distant, and had no time for children. At his best, he was an actor playing a father. At his usual, he was a man who endured his children. At his worst, he resented us.
Well, even in a book that I don't fully connect with I can find a passage with which I can. This is pretty much my childhood memories -- no cataclysm but an unhealthy echo of neglect and resentment (without the gentle fixer of a mother). And here's an interesting synchronicity: In the book, Strauss recalls that his fondest childhood memory was a picnic he had with his parents; he can still, years later, remember the tang of the mustard on his roast beef sandwich and the aura of goodwill of that afternoon. But when later he reminds his father and then his mother of that day, neither of them remembers having a picnic, and although Strauss goes looking for that perfect spot within walking distance of their home that he remembers, he eventually must concede that that spot, and that perfect day, was a confabulation. As for me, I was once snivelling about how we never did anything interesting as kids -- about how our stay-at-home mom always stayed at home when she made us go out to play -- and Ken said, "No way. Remember all the picnics Mom used to take us on? It was all the time."
Um, no? I remember never doing nothing, nowhere, nohow. So what's up with that? Confabulation for him or repression for me? Or did we only go for picnics when I was so little that I no longer remember, yet Ken was just old enough that he does?
My mother was just here with us last week and she remarked on how Mallory's (bright red) walls are sure covered with a lot of stuff (like, nearly every square centimeter). "And imagine," she said, "you weren't allowed to put up anything."
"Yeah," I chuckled. "That's probably why I'm so permissive about it."
Since my parents were always open to being transferred through my Dad's work, they always felt that their homes needed to be ready to sell at a moment's notice, and even though they only transferred 4 times while we were still living at home, they had a strict nothing on the walls policy to prevent nail holes (and while my bedrooms were eventually painted some non-offensive shades, all the main rooms of our houses remained stark white). Moving around was bad enough without feeling like we were in a long-term hotel stay (and with bad luck in the housing markets, none of their homes sold quickly anyway -- a situation repeatedly solved by the company buying out the houses from them).
And as a final thought: I brought my girls on many picnics, and honestly, they didn't really like them. When they were little enough to be brought in the bike trailer, they were game, but once it involved walking or riding their own bikes or even driving to a nice park, the whole idea just fizzled out. And as much as I have tried to not repeat the wrongs from my own childhood, the last thing I want is for them to eventually complain to each other about, "Remember how Mom used to make us go on all those picnics?"
"I know, right? How lame was that?"
Or maybe they won't remember them at all...
*****
2014 Finalists for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize (with my personal ranking):
