Charles Fernyhough
Lest We Remember
Forgetting: Myths, Perils and Compensations
By Douwe Draaisma (Translated by Liz Waters)
Yale University Press 276pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
Bucked from his half-broken horse in Jorge Luis Borges’s famous short story ‘Funes the Memorious’, Ireneo Funes suffers a head injury that leaves him pathologically unable to forget. ‘He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once, or with the feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the Río Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho.’ The damaged hero complains that his memory is ‘like a garbage heap’. He cannot sift the valuable lessons of his experience from the repetitive junk.
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