Ransacking Paris (2015)
“Annie Ernaux I like the idea of memory as a palimpsest, a parchment where remains of earlier writing or drawings can be seen through the present text. At times older memories float up and are read before the later ones. Months and days and years are interleaved. I could try to establish dates more accurately – and I do try, making alignments with weather, with political events, who was president in France at the time – but that’s not really the point. It seems more accurate to try to make the l...ayers and fragments that form memory. And then stories already told, already written, float in and repeat themselves, the details changing a little, told and retold down the years until the repetitions darken like layers of glue and paper.
I do remember Anthony was in Jordan in early November and I had been alone all week. Although I had joined the choir and made an arrangement to meet Sylvie, I still didn’t have anyone else to talk to. Now that I was in a new quartier, the shopkeepers didn’t yet recognise me either, so I often had that floating sense of being, if not quite invisible, then negligible, as I’d been that hot summer day on the rue St Jacques in the early months.MoreLess
I do remember Anthony was in Jordan in early November and I had been alone all week. Although I had joined the choir and made an arrangement to meet Sylvie, I still didn’t have anyone else to talk to. Now that I was in a new quartier, the shopkeepers didn’t yet recognise me either, so I often had that floating sense of being, if not quite invisible, then negligible, as I’d been that hot summer day on the rue St Jacques in the early months.MoreLess
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