Reading Dora Bruder was an experience. It seemed connected to everything—Proust, Benjamin, docupoetry/Green-Wood, my own future, my near future with regards to the Memory Project—in a really satisfying way, and simultaneously, I found it incredibly frustrating as far as authorial/editorial choices went, like when to show documents and when to paraphrase, when to speculate or imagine. The slipperiness of the reality, or of the relationship between real and imagined. I kept asking, is this really real? I haven’t looked it up yet to find out. My guess is it’s somewhere between real and fiction, kind of like Stories We Tell or The Things They Carried—accessing the truth (or “truth”) through a level of fictionality that works much better than just fact to tell the essential thing. But I don’t know—it could all be true. Either way, it’s a masterpiece of editing, of slow revelation. It drove me crazy. I wanted it laid out straight, or I wanted to be absorbed by it, as I was with Stories We Tell, and not notice the questions of reality/imagination/editing, let the story turn off my critical faculties. It was almost like an itch, these questions. And the pronouns, the person of the narrator—mostly first person telling a story in third, and then this occasional, unannounced, casual slip into second. Putting us into Dora’s shoes, mostly, but sometimes the narrator’s, or some unknown third party.

…

Well, I gave in and looked it up. Dora Bruder does not have a Wikipedia entry, but Patrick Modiano does. He really did write a book called La Place de L’étoile, so that’s factually true, at least. Dora Bruder is classed as a novel—a work of fiction. But The Things They Carried is classed as a memoir, despite having known, disticnt elements of untruth, of fiction. So I don’t know, still. The New Statesman ran a piece in 2014 called “Why nobody knows what to think about Patrick Modiano winning the Nobel Prize for Literature” that might have more answers, or at least further questions.  It calls Dora Bruder (or, apparently in some English editions, Search Warrant) “a documentary account.” Then why are there no citations of any kind, no Notes in the back? The NS piece also makes the connection to Proust, noting that all of Modiano’s works are connected/ongoing, like the volumes of In Search of Lost Time.

The Kirkus Review listed on Amazon describes the book as “Not a Holocaust memoir or historical fiction but a skillful reconstruction of life that strides the two genres.” It’s funny that this ambiguity pisses me off so much, because this is close to the kind of work I adored last quarter—documentary poetry, specifically Allison Cobb’s Green-Wood—and to the kind of work I want to make, I think, in the future. I think what gets me is the opacity. What I loved about Green-Wood was its transparency, except as I write that I remember it’s not true. I remember feeling puzzled there, too: though there were notes and clearer citations, it wasn’t line by line or footnoted, it wasn’t always clear what was borrowed and what was original. Which I guess raises its own questions about the nature of ‘originality,’ but that’s a whole other story (or blog post). So then what is the difference, if not transparency/opacity? Or would I find myself peeved at the books I loved last quarter, if I reread now, in light of the questions of identity, narrator reliability/stability, memory/imagination/reality, that have been raised by and around the texts in this program? How do I reconcile these questions and frustrations with my own desire for genre-bending, documentary or research-based creative work? Where do I find my place in this conversation as a writer and as a reader/student/thinker? I don’t think answers to any of these questions are ready to come out of me yet. I think I need to stew in them for a while. But I had to isolate the questions to start stewing, so…here we go, I guess.