Books

Memory
By Philippe Grimbert, translated from the French by Polly McLean, Simon & Schuster, 2008, 152 pp.

Memory is a lean little novel that relentlessly resonates with the dishonor of the Vichy regime and the horrors of the Holocaust.

It was first published as Secret in 2004 and became a bestseller throughout Europe, winning major awards including the annual Prix Wizo, for the best work of Jewish interest in French Literature.

It is memory that infuses the book, manifesting itself as both a recollection of the anguish of family (Grimbert has loosely fictionalized his own experiences) and of the ignominy of history.

The book's power lies in its brevity — it can be read in one sitting — and its spare language, as if poetry of any sort would dishonor the story it has to tell.

The time of Memory is post-World War II Paris. The book's narrator is a frail young man, the only child of parents who are just the opposite. He is overpowered by his mother Tania's exquisite beauty and his father Maxime's athletic prowess.

They are parents, he tells us, "whose every muscle had been buffed and toned, like those statues in the galleries of the Louvre that I found so unsettling."

One day, the narrator accompanies his mother to the attic of their home and retrieves a stuffed dog that he names Si. Later that night he creates an older brother "behind whom I could withdraw, a brother who would burden me with the full force of his weight."

Curious about the effect that his "brother" is having on his parents, the narrator finds his family unwilling to address his inquiries: "Affectionate as they were, my uncles, aunts, and grandparents seemed surrounded by an intangible barrier forbidding questions and warding off confidences. A secret club, bound together by an impossible grief."

Answers come from Mademoiselle Louise, a massage therapist who regularly treats Maxime and Tania and who has been their friend since before the war.

Louise is in her 60s and cobbled by rheumatism, tobacco and a clubfoot. She carefully, quietly reveals the truth to the narrator, a truth rife with secrets of his parents' relationship before they married each other, of an actual brother named Simon, of betrayal and of the shatteringly impulsive decision that has made the horrors of the Holocaust a daily memory.

Memory is about family, desire, and how we can never retreat too far from the crush of history. It is about how little we can do to avoid the unspeakable and about how the past always informs the person we become.

That Philippe Grimbert could share his difficult past so unsparingly gives this small, affecting gem of a book an extraordinary, resonant power that won't easily be forgotten.

Steven Whitton is a professor of English at Jacksonville State University.