Showing results for "Time and Memory" in World Literature

With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a poetic voice.

Nobody likes being on agricultural rotation, and with this heat wave, it’s almost more than Ester can take. She’s itching for something she can’t put words to—something she has no memory of wanting. But then, she can’t remember much beyond the past couple of years. She’s sent to the husband archive for a cure, but the man she checks out comes with baggage: stacks and stacks of paper he calls “books.” What they teach each other may prove hard to forget.

These four works show Samuel Beckett at his most penetrating. Both Krapp's Last Tape (1958) and Not I (1972) are among the most striking pieces written for the theatre in the 20th century. An old man sits at a table, playing back old tapes made when he was younger, mixed glimpses of past feelings. In Not I, we have just a mouth expressing memories and torment in a torrent of words.