![]() ![]() Jakob's memoir spans his whole life, yet omits most of what we would expect in an autobiography. The process of narration mimics the influence of the past, which returns in flashback or imagined episodes. The story is clear enough, but the telling of the story - the narration - is not. Bella's end can only be imagined, and indeed he cannot stop imagining it, feeding his visions with the terrible data of history. Over the years Athos tries and fails to find some clue. Narration supplies what the narrator has not experienced. Then the peaceful blue sheen of the Aegean slipped shut again." ![]() The water rose around us, bullets tearing the surface for those who took too long to drown. "As he spoke, the room filled with shouts. ![]() Hidden in Athos's remote home, he has not even directly witnessed the Nazi occupation of Greece.Īthos tells him how the Jews of Crete have been murdered by the Germans, and for the child it is like an enactment. He is a survivor who only retrospectively begins to understand what he has survived. ![]() "The facts of the war began to reach us." Michaels cannily invents a narrator who has not seen the horrors that obsess him. Later, shards of knowledge about the history that has destroyed his family enter his narration. It is also an appalled flinching from what happened. But it is not just the incomplete comprehension of a child that the narration mimics. His narrative eventually takes us to the present tense, "where I now sit and write this, these many years later" he is recalling events from childhood, half a century earlier. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |