Remember Me

I liked "The Hiding Place" a lot, but nothing prepared me for this quietly devasting book, possibly one of the saddest things I've ever read. Winnie's world was always small, but as each of the few people she relies on slip through her fingers, and as each tiny act of thoughtless cruelty shakes her fragile mental health, she grows more and more alone, until the world abandons her altogether and she has to make a reality from the ghosts in her head. I found this book heartbreaking and I can't stop thinking about it.

Of the half dozen or more books I read per month, the vast majority are forgotten before I'm through chapter 1 of the next. This is one of those rare gems that stay in your mind and heart long after the last chapter. In this emotional (surprisingly NOT depressing) book, Azzopardi weaves a story out of fragments of memory, waiting until the end to show the subtle, yet startling, tapestry. It is an artfully impressionistic image of a life--unprotected, unsheltered, unfulfilled. In the end, the picture is clear, the author provides all the information we really need to know. Other reviewers have given an idea of the story. But the telling of it, more that the plot itself, makes this the best book I've read in a long, long time.

Welsh-born Trezza Azzopardi has followed up her remarkable debut novel ("Hiding Place") with one that shows maturity and skill in addition to a gentle empathy with her characters. The narrative is related by an old woman who is what was once called "simple-minded." Passed around as a child amongst adults who alternately love, use, tolerate and scorn her, she struggles to make sense of events in terms she can understand. Painfully aware of her "differentness", she learns to ride the hard times patiently and fight back only when pushed beyond endurance.Azzopardi has cleverly allowed the thoughts of her protagonist, as expressed in the story, to be articulate and perceptive, although the character struggles to express herself out loud to others. The result is a sustained level of tension with poetic imagery that never becomes overwrought or maudlin. By the end of "Remember Me", Winnie has made her peace with the world, and neither wants nor needs our sympathy. Nevertheless, we should be ashamed that she was based on a real life "resident of the streets", one of those forced to squat in abandoned buildings in the middle of so much affluence.

Azzopardi's new book outclasses the excellent 'the hiding place' in every way. The end of this book goes through you like a wrecking ball. Compare it to Trevor's 'the life of Lucy Galt' and Coetzee's 'Age of Iron'.Azzopardi in a new voice in modern literature, one which speaks lowly but with terrible power.

Azzopardi's technique of going back and forth between present and various times in the past is a little difficult to get used to. She did it in her first novel, "The Hiding Place," as well. But once you get so far into her story, you see that the way she has organized it is a careful reconstruction of how memory chases us, how so much remains buried, and when it does surface, it comes in fits and fleets, in a dream-like dance. This is the process of becoming conscious that the great psychiatrist, Carl Jung, pioneered.Patricia/Lillian/Winnie isn't just a sad old homeless woman Azzopardi means for us to pity and think, "There but for the grace of God go I." Winnie is those among us--and we are legion, as the demons said to Christ--who have let objects usurp the place in our lives that real feeling, actual people, and the truth of events should hold. Looking at Winnie this way, we see that her actual poverty is our poverty of soul, regardless of economic status, which we hide from ourselves by acquiring things as some sort of cushion against facing up to our alienation and despair. When we save "artefacts" from our past and the pasts of those close to us, it is to remember only what was not painful and to color falsely what was reality. But finding meaning in life involves shedding the things AND the illusions and taking on the despair. Hope is on its other side.Azzopardi is a fascinating master of character and words, and her work so far is some of the best I've read ever. She truly captures the nature of the human problem at the beginning of the 21st century and points us in the direction of its solution.