Recuerdos inventados: Primera antología personal (Invented Memories: First Personal Anthology) - a collection of stories specifically selected by Enrique Vila-Matas. Since I've fallen in love with the title piece, Invented Memories, this is the tale I'll make the focus of my review.
INVENTED MEMORIES
What we have here is a ten-page short story composed of twenty-seven micro-chapters. I've linked my comments below with a number of delicious direct Enrique Vila-Matas quotes taken from the tale.
“And that is precisely what is so strange and fascinating about literature, the fact that it is not a static organism, but something that mutates with every reading, something that constantly changes.”
One of the prime benefits of a work of literature is the opportunity it offers for self-reflection. When we reread a book, such as a novel, we can observe how much we have changed since our last reading. In many ways, we are engaging with a different book. Although the sentences and paragraphs remain unchanged, we ourselves have undergone transformations; thus, in a very real sense, the book we are reading evolves along with us.
“What matters is that everything always leaves something behind, and however small the flame, someone might be able to take it up and use it to find something else.”
Ars longa, vita brevis. A magnificent benefit of being a writer is that we can pass on to others something of ourselves: our thoughts, our feelings, our day-to-day experiences of the world. Oh, how I wish one of my grandparents or great-grandparents had left a journal, a diary, or anything of the sort. As it stands, I have no written record bearing testament to the lives they led. Drats!
“I can remember a lot of men swearing on their lives, and yet no one knows what life really is.”
Tell it like it is, Enrique! The longer I live, the more I can detect the haze of illusion, delusion, and ignorance clouding our all too human understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.
“I remember always thinking that life itself doesn't actually exist, because if no one tells it as a story or turns it into a narrative, life is merely something that happens, nothing more.”
Both ancient wisdom traditions and modern philosophy and psychology recognize that what we consider our "Self" is a conceptual construct we create as part of an ongoing narrative. I recall Will Self expressing skepticism regarding the auto-fiction of Karl Ove Knausgård. Will questions how Karl Ove can genuinely believe that the little eight-year-old kid he writes about is actually him. Whether we like to admit it or not, our individual identity is entirely constructed by the specific narratives we compile at any given moment. Anything else amounts to little more than a puff of smoke.
“Since nothing very memorable had happened in my life, I used to be a man with scarcely any biography. Until I decided to invent one for myself. I took refuge in the universe of various writers and, using other people's memories – which were, I realized, related to their books or imaginations – I forged a memory of my own and a new identity.”
I suspect Enrique had lots of fun with his narrator's going about building his unique identity though reading about interesting characters in novels. Maybe it's time others take this as a prompt: rather than being a nobody, men could read The Glass Bead Game and become Joseph Knecht, and women could read Sense and Sensibility and become Elinor Dashwood.
The narrator returns from Asia “filled with the suspicion that the universe is a prison from which one is never ever released and never will be.”
In the yoga tradition, there's the concept of moksha, release from the cycle of birth and death that is samsara. But how real is moksha for the narrator, a Western writer? Or, for that matter, how real is a release for any Westerner unwilling to submit to the discipline of yoga?
“And even though I scream and scream and am a seagull, I am not mad.”
I always love it when I encounter a narrator of a story who insists they are not mad, especially if they have spend half their life screaming.
“I used to write short pieces, and in each collection there would be one, two, or perhaps three that I preferred to the others, and even though those preferences varied by the day and by the minute, a day and a moment came when, on a whim, I set them down in a personal anthology of remembered inventions that I titled Invented Memories.
No comment necessary other than urging you to read more Enrique Vila-Matas.
*Note – For readers of English, Invented Memories is among the short stories in Vampire in Love, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and published by New Directions
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