By Connie Nardini
To go through the door of memory, you must shrink like Alice in Wonderland; the door is tall and slotted – some light seems to filter in through the cracks. Because you can only see partly, can memory of what happened in your childhood be trusted?
William Maxwell says in his 1980 American Book Award-winning novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, “In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.” Even so, his narrator tries to again become the small boy whose world could not return to the normality of tomorrow after being visited by violence and death.
The narrator, whom I’ll call William (because he is unnamed in the novel), first meets death in rural 1920s Illinois when his mother dies while giving birth to his younger brother when he was 10 years old. He goes through the first door then: “I had to find an explanation other than the real one, which was that we were no more immune to misfortune that anyone else, and that I had inadvertently walked through a door I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave. Actually, it was the other way around; I hadn’t gone anywhere and nothing was changed, as far as the roof over our heads was concerned, it was just that she was in the cemetery.”
Posted on February 2, 2009