The value of looking back
Looking back can and should be beautiful. This is one of the phrases that will serve as a basis for me, this Sant Jordi, to dedicate the book We Were So Young, where I describe in words some photographs from my family albums. My intention in writing it is to invite readers to review their own albums and to let themselves be carried away by this kind of nostalgia that does not cause suffering.
These days I have read a novel – a great novel – that has come to confirm what I was telling you: looking back can and should be beautiful. In the case of Kolkhoz, by Emmanuel Carrère, it is beautiful, interesting, fun, and very moving.
The French author looks back a little – towards his childhood, when his mother and he were united by a burning love –, fleetingly – towards the last years, when the mother-son relationship became strained –, and much further back – to trace the history of his family, which is a story filled with relevant characters and events –. Carrère weaves family history with that of Europe with an agility and intensity that grips you from the first moment to the last page.
Although I spent a good part of the novel envying a family history like Carrère’s – which, for a writer, is a well of treasures –, I was touched to realize how this writer, son of a great figure of French intellectualism, cousin of the president of Georgia, descendant of a regicide and a Russian prince, among others, when he has to choose one memory, just one, from the drawer of his memory, chooses this one: “My sisters and I, in the back seat, were covered by an old Scottish blanket; a curious detail, in the middle of summer. My parents, in front, spoke in hushed tones. I pretended to sleep. It rarely rained, but if it did and the sound of the windshield wipers lulled us, everything was even better. Once parked in the hotel parking lot, my parents, so as not to wake us, would take us to reception, and then upstairs to our room. If I have to keep only one memory of my time on earth, let it be this one: the crunch of gravel under my father's steps, on a summer night, as he carried me through the parking lot of the Hôtel du Chapon Fin”.
Kolkhoz – you have to discover what is hidden behind this title, I don't want to spoil it for you – tells how to passionately love a mother who makes it difficult, and it is also a defense of the will to look back.
Happy Sant Jordi!