Memory

I'm reading Mario Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral right now, and like many of his novels--The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, The Storyteller, The War of the End of the World, Death in the Andes, The Feast of the Goat--It is a novel haunted by memory. It's about 1950's and 60's Peru, but it's really more about the way the past comes to haunt the present, how people live in chains they themselves have forged. Most of the plot of each of these novels is a mystery--we learn about the truth even as the characters retell their stories and put the pieces together, thereby themselves moving closer to the truth. And we get confused about whether the dialogue is in the present, or the past, and about who's doing the talking . . . making our own approximation of the truth a bit . . . provisional.

The thing is, it plays tricks on us, doesn't it? We're never sure it's telling us the truth, are we?

I've recently been having conversations about things that happened, oh, 14, 15 years ago. . . it's amazing how time changes things and doesn't change them at all. How some things 'stick,' and others don't.