Family secrets

Philippe GRIMBERT’S “Memory” (Simon & Schuster: 152 pp., $19.95) comes billed as a novel, but it’s unclear where the border between fact and fiction lies. “[P]eople were always asking me about the origins of the name Grimbert,” the narrator says, “ . . . unearthing the n that an m had replaced, flushing out the g that a t was supposed to efface from memory.” Grinberg/Grimbert seems such a small distinction, but ultimately it conceals so much. “M for mute hid the N of Nazism while G for ghosts vanished under taciturn T.”

“Memory” is a story about World War II, and in particular the experience of Grimbert’s parents, Parisian Jews who rode out the occupation in rural France. More than that, it is about the lies we tell ourselves, the stories to which we cling in order to make sense of the senseless, to give context to our grief and our loss.

What Grimbert’s parents never revealed to him is that he had an older half brother who died during the war, a victim of the Holocaust. This boy is such a profound source of denial that he cannot even be remembered; he is never spoken of. To get at his family’s actual story, then, Grimbert must unravel a fiction so all-prevailing that it has become its own reality. Here we have the logic for “Memory” being called a novel, since it is in the end a reconstruction, written with a novelist’s eye for detail, for the invention that tells the truth.

That’s a fascinating choice, especially at a moment when we can’t seem to tell the difference between fiction and memoir any longer, when we seem to have lost our sense of authenticity. But this, of course, is the entire point here, the way that, like Grimbert, we have no other option but to move back and forth from memory to conjecture, from what we recollect to what we can never know.

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-- David L. Ulin

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david.ulin@latimes.com