Melancholy, concerned with time and memory. Sometimes time collapses on itself, folds two moments a half century or longer apart into a single instance. Holocaust a looming presence throughout, lurking in the wings of memory, omnipresent but best not stared at directly.
Systematic return to the places of friends and ancestors in an effort to, what, piece together one's own murky identity?
Slippery, plays with the distinction between fiction and non.
Memories disappear without a trace, only to return in full, vivid force years later at some subtle prompting. Sometimes it is unclear whether these are memories or fantasies so palpable that they supplant immediate reality.
There are some real humdingers of sentences, nary a word out of place, like an elaborate ironwork, but I am mostly inured to the beauty of language and they do not satisfy me as they do Alison. But perhaps this can come back, as some other forgotten pleasures have lately hinted.
Recurring themes: nature, looking down at things from the Swiss Alps, being a teacher in small Central European towns, decrepitude and the wearing of time, blurring of time and space and memory, living inside someone else's memories, the Holocaust, the question of belonging to Germany, Jewishness, returning to the same place decades later, loneliness, homelessness, feeling dwarfed by industrial infrastructure, preserving from the dumb, obliterating present a few relics of the past, involuntary memory a la Proust, and other stuff like that.
