While I’m not a fan of the style of prose, I do very much prefer it when an author writes a story that communicates something of themselves. And memory is a fascinating subject. One I return to over and over again myself, and feels like a enduring question ingrained in the life cycle of amy given human. Musings like this, when I was young, probably would have seemed ludicrous.

But the older one gets the more self evident it becomes that memory is not at all as you believe it to be when you’re growing up. So many things alter it and I have many of the same feelings about memory as are codified in this book.

In a way, that is precisely what failed to connect for me, though. If you seek out stories about memory, as I have, for a long time, it feels like these revelations have lost their lustre. So while I connected at a meta level as like-recognizes-like, at the authorial-reader level, the story itself felt like walking a far too familiar path. The ending is similarly perfunctory if you pay attention.

It’s interesting being frustrated with a protagonist, and I think it could have formed a better bond, had the prose not been preoccupied with concrete steam or consciousness with no time or place or anything active. And so, because Tony “just doesn’t get it”, and his perception of the world is so ineffectual, it was hard for me to care about him and his story. Other than as a warning about motivation thinking, but that’s the retread path.

If I had to try to describe exactly why it’s not 3 stars and not 5 stars, I’d compare it to a family member—probably an uncle or a father—telling you a story you’ve heard many times, but they continue, for whatever reason, to tell the tale (perhaps without remembering who they’ve told it to) again and again and again. It’s not that it’s a bad story. It’s well told and you have new context every time you hear it, to some degree. But you do already know it, the way it will be told, and you know that at some point you’ll be hearing this story again. Possibly soon.