Ah, but the land is unforgettable

Memory is, by its very nature, an erratic and highly selective instrument. A strong memory, let’s face it, is often as much a burden as an asset, like being overrun with sensory stimulation all the time: the sound, look, feel and smell of experience coming at one with no breaks for blurring out or fading away. Writers, of course, tend to be stuck in the alembic of the past: There is, most famously, Proust, who began seven volumes of nostalgic summation by relating that he used to go to bed early as a child and wait anxiously for his beloved Mamma to come and kiss him goodnight. And one can read all of Virginia Woolf’s fiction as stemming from a need to capture by force of creative will what no longer exists, as in “To the Lighthouse,” in which she resurrects the summers she spent as a child in St. Ives, which were brought to a sudden end by the death of her mother when Woolf was 13.

I remember several years ago being fascinated by a newspaper article about a man who suffered from not being able to forget. I empathized with his plight, in part because I am saddled with a fairly vigilant memory and, based on my own far less acute version of his predicament, could well imagine how insufferable total recall would be, every bit as much an impediment to an easeful inhabitation of the world as total amnesia. I was reminded of this man recently while reading Tony Eprile’s extraordinary novel, “The Persistence of Memory,” whose narrator considers himself to be something of a freak because of his “poisoned gift” of “a picture-perfect memory.”

The novel is set in South Africa and begins in 1968, when apartheid was beginning to fray at the edges under the noses of some white South Africans, even the most well meaning of whom still felt free to treat their black domestics like “bloody kaffirs,” a lower order of human specimen: “Do you know, scientists have shown that Africans will eat their own weight in meat in ten days if left to themselves?” It closes sociocultural light-years later, in 2000, by which time President Frederik W. de Klerk has shared the Nobel Peace Prize with African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela; white Africans have “gone Af “and changed their names “to the nearest Nguni or Sotho equivalent”; and the book’s narrator, Paul Sweetwater, is called in front of a Truth Commission to testify about a massacre carried out on the border between South Africa and Namibia by the army division in which he served as a unit cameraman.

It should be said right off that what sets “The Persistence of Memory” vividly apart from much of the remarkable literature that has come out of that calamitous country -- the novels of J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer as well those by Alan Paton and Andre Brink -- is that, more than any of these writers, Eprile treats the searing, desperate reality of apartheid neither as a guilt-ridden co-conspirator (no one chooses, after all, to be born into one place or family rather than another) nor as a detached, universalist observer to the infinite corruptibility of humankind.

He allows his protagonist to recognize the darkly alluring gratifications intrinsic to the abuse of power (“How quickly one falls into the thinking habits of paternalism!”) that informs the relations between oppressor and oppressed. Similarly Paul does not pretend to be, in the service of some sort of unrealistic liberal penitence, at one beneath the skin with absolutely everyone he meets. When he comes into contact with two Bushmen trackers -- “slight, beautiful men with high cheekbones, brown skin, and short curled hair growing in separate clumps like bushes in the Kaokoveld, the ‘peppercorn hair’ I had read about” who are hired by the military to inform on violent disturbances in the townships and elsewhere -- he admits to finding them impossibly alien: “Throughout the evening, I try to find an excuse to come close to them, fascinated by their wildness. They seem to me more like part of the natural kingdom than fellow human beings -- though my reason rejects this romantic fantasizing.”

Paul Sweetwater is doomed to remember everything that has ever happened to him, from an incident when he was an overweight and picked-on 8-year-old who ducked into a toilet stall to eat a chocolate treat unobserved by his jeering classmates to the sight of a “burning human being” in a South African township he has been ordered into during his military service: “Ignoring the horrible smell of burning petroleum and charred meat, I film the smoldering body, which still seems to writhe in agony, though I tell myself that is just involuntary movement, like the settling of logs in a fire. No one could still be alive in this state.”

Then again, Paul has always felt lonely and alienated, like “some lungfish that has crawled up onto land only to discover that the age of mammals is in full swing,” for reasons other than having to live with the crushing specificity of his memories. He is, for one thing, constantly aware of his fatness, of being a viscerally unappealing specimen, “a prodigious perspirer” who moves fellow bus passengers to wipe his seat after he gets up.

As a pale, lumbering 16-year-old, he hides behind a book like a “great beached whale” on the sands of Clifton Beach, near Cape Town, pretending to be engrossed by his daunting choice of reading (“[H]e was hoping some member of the fairer sex would ask about it and he could dazzle her with his extensive knowledge of the phylum Arthropoda.”) only to be taunted by the “bronzed young Afrikaner Adonis” nearby who suspects the solitary Paul of peeping from behind the pages at his female companion, the “exquisite young thing” who lies next to him, “her impossibly smooth skin glistening like oiled Knysna yellow-wood.”

The terrible irony of it, of course, is that “our hero” (as Eprile occasionally refers to his deeply sensitive protagonist, sounding for a moment like the author of “Tom Jones”) has come of age in a country that thrives on forgetting, on methodically stripping itself of one historical blight or trauma after another, leaving them behind for others to reckon with, all the while moving forward with an untroubled conscience.

“History, memory, is plastic here in the R.S.A. You remember it the way you would have wanted it to be, not the way it was.” Paul tries to come to terms with this harsh realpolitik by talking to his shrink, Dr. Vishinski, “he of the pointed goatee and folded hands,” about the troubling incongruities he has witnessed growing up in an affluent Johannesburg suburb “in the monarchic luxury of being a Jewish child, male child, only child.” We and “Dr. Vish” hear about the Sons of Abraham, an elite Jewish high school Paul has attended, where history textbooks still teach the ruling class’ benignly paternalistic version of things; about his doting mother’s “hormonal rages” and “hysterical” pregnancy; the sudden loss when he was 3 of his nanny, “vast, dark Miriam,” who provided “an infinite expanse of warm flesh for a baby to love” while his mother was off playing tennis; and his father’s mysteriously tragic death (listed officially as death by misadventure but possibly a suicide), which goes undiscussed by his widow. (“[S]he rarely mentions the existence of any paternal progenitor for me ... the unspoken myth being that I spontaneously generated inside her uterus.”)

None of these therapeutic airings, however, proves of any use, because Paul’s psyche centers on “a power of recall that is not only accurate but empathetic.” It is radically at odds both with the “rose-colored recall” that marks the national white psyche and the brutally vengeful sense of immediacy that characterizes the “restive, angry townships” that have bred unforgiving young men: “The faces are set and rigid, the eyes hard with anger. The message in those eyes is clear and unlike any I have seen, even in the towns of Namibia: We want you dead, white boy!” Fed up, he quits therapy, but not before accusing the doctor of existential bad faith: “How can anyone,” he rails at Dr. Vish, “honestly practice psychiatry in this police state? If you really cured your patients, what choice would they have but to bomb Pretoria Central at the first opportunity?”

Eprile, who grew up in South Africa and now lives in Vermont, is the author of one previous book, an acclaimed collection titled “Temporary Sojourner and Other South African Stories.” Fifteen years have passed since its publication, which perhaps explains why he seems so astonishingly formed as a writer -- a major writer -- with a tragicomic vision and a truth-telling but non-rancorous voice all his own.

“The Persistence of Memory,” be forewarned, is not an easy novel to get into: It throws all its chips into the air at once, like a dazzling Nabokovian trick, creating an atmosphere thick with historical and local color without first paving the way for the reader to contextualize any of it. In the space of just one page, the myriad allusions include a reference to Rothman’s King Size cigarettes, the Yiddish word for a drunkard (“a schicker”) and Afrikaans phrases for certain kinds of pastry, “vetkoeke and koeksisters.” But it is well worth sticking with Eprile’s fecund imagination until the moment when everything begins to click into place.

Charged with a shining imagination, “The Persistence of Memory” is reflective of everything that it meets up with, at once capacious and finely honed. Think Laurence Sterne meets Proust meets the antic, dissembling spirit of Stanley Elkin. It’s part bricolage, part lyric paean to the passage of childhood, part bitter yet nonmoralistic indictment of a country -- South Africa -- steeped in horror and exploitation yet also a country like any other, with suburbs where wealthy housewives trade recipes for lamb curry with their black housekeepers.

Eprile has resisted the easy way out, which would be to replace one sort of self-serving, delusional account of what transpired with yet another: “some fairy-tale history in which all the whites are bad and all the blacks are saints.” He refuses to let his volatile material call all the ethical shots simply because it is there, a big angry blood-stained blot called apartheid, just as he refuses to judge his characters by their color or their political coloration. There are ignoble Afrikaners in this book, including the ones just beginning to grow into their hatred, “the shaven-headed, hard-eyed teenagers standing outside cafes on the street corners, tough kids who liked to fight.” But there is also his Afrikaner pal from the army, Roelof, who, Paul explains, mocks his “race’s pretensions” and connects with Paul as no one has before. “I know that I am going to sorely miss Roelof,” he observes, “who has broken past my isolation and proven to be one of the rare human beings I can share my thoughts with.”

In the end, part of the narrator’s uniquely tolerant outlook is that he can’t quite wrap his head around the phenomenon of apartheid: “[W]ho would have believed the degree of absurdity attained by the mad Dutchman’s philosophy? Who could have invented the idea of toilets destined only for bottoms of a particular hue, primarily ‘European’ women?”

For all the largeness of the author’s vision, though, this is a novel that captivates because of its specific and precise renderings: “I am narrowing down the focus of the vast lens of memory,” Eprile writes. “Here is our green planet with its trailing wisps of smoke from burning fields and forests. Here is my country, shaped like a laughing clown face.... Here is my house, in this city of blue pools with its wart of townships larger than its own head. Here, in the kitchen, Corinthia is making her marvelous pastries. I zoom in until there are only her hands, sifting flour into the batter, kneading dough, laying out preserved fruit....” Here then, is an unforgettable book, presenting a world so richly imagined as to make the reader feel, at least for a while, that he or she is there, in that house, in that kitchen, getting ready to savor those baked goods as soon as they emerge from the oven and enter the portals of a strange and compelling universe. *

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From The Persistence of Memory

I am sitting in the comfy armchair in my living room, a glass of Johnny Walker Black (Dad’s favorite brand) on the coffee table in front of me. Next to my drink is the tape player that I have not yet dared to turn on. Finally, I do so. I take a sip of my scotch, wondering for a moment whether I should have chosen a distillation with a more assertive character ... or to have been born with a more assertive character. Then I close my eyes and listen.