Tag Archive
Astrid Bas Diptych: The Lover and La Musica Deuxième
Astrid Bas: Diptych, The Lover and La Musica Deuxième, faithfully takes some of the most memorable passages of Duras on love, desire, and her youth from The Lover (1984) and pairs it with her play La Musica Deuxième (1985), a piece exploring the end of love as a soon-to-be divorced couple takes leave of... »
From Nagasaki to Afghanistan: Kamila Shamsie’s “Burnt Shadows”
Maybe it’s because I spent a good part of my college years studying trauma and how people experience and record it; maybe because World War II and its fallout—both figurative and literal—is a topic I find myself drawn to again and again (my thesis was based on an oral history project I conducted that... »
The Mathematics of Memory: The Housekeeper and the Professor
“Any kind of uncertainty caused him pain, so we were determined to hide the time that had passed or the memories he had lost.” Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor is the heartwarming story of the unlikely friendship between a single mother, her son, and an aging mathematician whose mind is stuck on... »
Carrying the Mantle of Milocz: Adam Zagajewski’s “Eternal Enemies”
Adam Zagajewski is often compared to the Polish poet Czeslaw Miloscz: both write of the proximity of history and memory in their native Poland, and both are seen as the preeminent writers to embody the emotions of that country. But where Milocz’s sensibilities developed during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw and his defection from... »
Resnais in Retrospect: Memory in “Night and Fog” and “Hiroshima Mon Amour”
The camera sweeps over an idyllic country landscape to the sound of gentle music. It pans lower, revealing relics of barbed wire that shred the softness of the scene. This is not an image painted by impressionists, but the effect of time on the ghostly remains of Auschwitz in 1955, ten years after the Allied... »