The Memory Artist by Katherine Brabon.
Pasha Ivanov wanders the streets of Moscow and then Leningrad (what is later to be known as St. Petersburg). It is the time of the thaw: where the memories of the dead are ever visible in the faces of the living.
It is 1990, Pasha is melancholic but optimistic – much it seems is the feeling of Russia at the time. Pasha is a young writer and a child of Dissidents. Gone are the days of the forced worship of Stalin; it would seem an idealistic time with slivers of hope and the Terror Years behind. The Soviet Union is crumbling, Mikhail Gorbachev openly criticises the establishment and monuments of old leaders are pulled down, Pasha and his friends are bolstered by the transparency of Glastnost; a time of perspicuity in a country of buried secrets. But as more stories are shared weariness unfolds and the pain of the truth is an old wound picked apart. What is the value of the truth when the truth is too painful? ‘me, Anya, her father, my father, countless others who had shared their histories during Glastnost and after—and our collective breath covered the glass in vapour’ Much like Jung’s theory on a collective unconsciousness; the whole of Russia is in a collective grief.
Brabon constructs memory like a patchwork of parchment riddled in invisible ink, as the story unfurls so does Russia’s past, ‘Time is just there, all at once. Linearity is a lie.’ The Memory Artist moves through several different timelines but does this seamlessly. Much like thought; memory behaves differently to time and Brabon depicts this well. With repeated imagery of reconstructed maps, the idea of finding the buried is haunting, ‘There were thought to be at least ten thousand buried there, telling a long history of state murder’.
For the reader The Memory Artist is at times emotionally fraught as it carries with it the burdensome and unconscious intentions of the narrator. This may be a novel of fiction but it is also testament of many voices, and many stories untold. These stories though told by fictional characters resonate with real history and with deep trauma. The reader feels this too. With such sparse moments of language, the writing conveys more than words can describe, ‘Maybe he was the ultimate artist, my father, at the moment he attained death by starvation…he chose what would happen to his incarcerated body and so was ultimately free.’
The Memory Artist can be a difficult read, as the emotional weight the reader carries is a heavy burden, but true empathy is always difficult.
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
The Memory Artist by Katherine Brabon
Category: Literary fiction
ISBN: 9781760292867
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Imprint: Allen & Unwin
Pub Date: May 2016
Page Extent: 304
