Image courtesy of Pixabay.
Imagine a novel about a man who
never knew his early years; it comes across as
a fictionalized story that nevertheless feels overwhelming
in the rich particularity of his life, and its
equally rich loneliness, as he struggles to live it.
Or perhaps it’s about a fictionalized man
with a lost past that was real, utterly real,
and his growing up is the story
of learning that there were chapters
in his life that he could never recover, which means,
of course, that this man could never fully
know himself, and would always be a mystery to himself.
Or perhaps it’s the story of the author,
fictionalized in the sense
that his protagonist never lived beyond
the covers of his book, but the essential
narrative of being lost in the world, “thrown into being,”
is true, is his life story, translated
into the story of a man whose life
had suffered an even greater rupture than his own, but
who, in his lonely heroism, distilled that irrevocable loss. Or
perhaps it’s a kind of allegory of what happens to individuals—
nations—that cut themselves off from their past, the truth
of who they are, and the novel in reality
is a book of exile, which traces the wanderings
of a people who will never know the origins
of their existence, and will never know home, the goal
their existence was there for.