Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the novel itself disorderly or dysfunctional.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.
Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.
I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.
Memory narrativises itself.
When people read a novel 600 pages long, six months pass, and all they will remember are five pages. They don't remember the text - instead, they remember the sensations the text gives them.
Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory. I like the atmospheres that result if episodes are narrated through the haze of memory.
Human memory is short and terribly fickle.
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.
Memory depends very much on the perspicuity, regularity, and order of our thoughts. Many complain of the want of memory, when the defect is in the judgment; and others, by grasping at all, retain nothing.