The Shadow of Memory

In this eerie, compelling, and playful novel, a young man tormented by his feeble memory meets an elderly man, Robert, endowed with the recall of an elephant. Soon, in exchange for becoming his live-in servant, Robert agrees to allow his young prot g to inherit his prodigious memory upon his death. While this might seem a fair if absurd exchange, Robert's demands become progressively more macabre, until the narrator is forced to decide what he is truly willing to sacrifice for the ability to remember. The debut novel of Bernard Comment, acclaimed author and editor, now available in English for the first time, The Shadow of Memory brings a fairy-tale premise into the modern world, where information--and its loss--can be a matter of life and death.

About the Author :
Bernard Comment, born in Switzerland, lives and works in Paris, where he directs the prestigious Fiction & Cie imprint at Editions du Seuil. He is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, including the story collection Tout passe, which received the Prix du Goncourt de la nouvelle in 2011. Betsy Wing has worked for many years as a translator of books from French to English and has published more than twenty volumes of translation with editors at Harvard, the University of Minnesota, the University of Nebraska and, more recently with Dalkey Archive Press. The works have ranged over many subjects: philosophy, political science, poetry and literary fiction, and ranging from the French feminist thought of Helene Cixous to the poetics and political philosophy of Edouard Glissant. Each translation involved delving into new ways of thinking about the world and, frequently, considerable research. Through her work in translation, Wing became acutely aware of the extent to which all works of art are also translations, whether written as fiction or poetry or created in one of the visual arts-translations of something haunting one's mind. Her new novel NOW HISTORY: One Home Front in WWII is, indeed a translation of distant voices, echoes of a time. She structured the novel around the information her characters, isolated from the actual events, had available to them on a daily basis-essentially the censored version of the war that they read in the daily paper. Lurking in the background is what we now know about the events of World War II, but the story on the pages of NOW HISTORY comes from long hours of reading their local paper on microfilm and imagining their lives around this information. The result is a subtle, poignant story of discovering the many losses that war entails, even at a distance, as well as the empowering knowledge that comes from learning to deal with difficulties on one's own. Wing's earlier fiction, a novella and short story collection, LOOK OUT FOR HYDROPHOBIA is a compilation gleaned from work done over a rather long period of time and deals in many touching and yet funny ways with various stages of a woman's maturity. More recently Betsy Wing has been exploring the art of printmaking as a form of expression (and translation). Her work is mostly monotypes, a painterly form of the art which produces singular, original pieces rather than the repeatable images for which most forms of printmaking are known. Her prints have been exhibited at the Caffery Gallery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and at the annual show of work by The Illuminateds at the Barn on Paradise Point in East Boothbay, Maine. They have also been exhibited in numerous juried shows. Some of them may be seen at the gallery attached to her website betsywing.com

Review :
"An ambitious novel that plays on the tension between one's desire to enjoy the present and the obsession with saving the past, without quite knowing what to do with it." --Isabelle Ruf "Bernard Comment is having a field day here. He slips and slides on puns, he surfs on comic situations, adds pearls of sweat to the unexpected, to the sordid details of daily life." --Isabelle Ruf An ambitious novel that plays on the tension between one s desire to enjoy the present and the obsession with saving the past, without quite knowing what to do with it. --Isabelle R f Bernard Comment is having a field day here. He slips and slides on puns, he surfs on comic situations, adds pearls of sweat to the unexpected, to the sordid details of daily life. --Isabelle R f