![]() ![]() White wine, glass after glass of white wine. Here is another kind of object of experience unforgettably rendered in the novel. In its metaphysical resonance it is a dream deeper than the objectivism of the imagists. This passage, and other similar ones in the novel, defies gloss because it is an uncanny amalgam of language and object, words and presences, syntax and broken melody. Abundant in the last–exile–the structure of loss. “Time stopped–the beginning of ritual–the annihilation pondered without space and time–we exist in it. The following paragraph renders N’s memory of a joyous festival that took place the night before. It is in its treatment of objects of experience that forgotten night most notably excels and is most original. Think, for instance, of Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Because N is a writer, working, as it were, on the novel we are reading, the book belongs in the ranks of metafictions about the struggle to capture in an ongoing text a fragmentary past. Thematically it is related to James’s compelling theme of American innocents in the Old World, where every Isabel Archer will meet her predatory Osmond. In style it often calls to mind Gertrude Stein at her most gnomic, or her adopted son Hemingway’s clipped precision. What, to cite Wittgenstein, are its family resemblances? Several can be noted, but with great caution, because we are talking about cousins, not siblings. forgotten night defies easy classification, as elusive in genre as it is hypnotic in its originality. Quest novels, from the Odyssey to Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, are familiar. So the quest for Madame Brissac gives the novel its narrative drive. She is the bearer of N’s hope that out of the senseless carnage of WWI and the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust some meaning will emerge. Does N find Madame Brissac? That is for each reader to decide, because Madame Brissac is not merely a person. ![]() Who is Madame Brissac anyway? She would be a descendant of a fellow youth N’s grandfather encountered in 1907 in flight from Romania, where a peasant uprising focused its hatred on Jews. Nor is it clear in the beginning exactly what she hopes to learn from Madame Brissac. But N is not an adept seeker, inquiring here and there, assailed by distractions, often in the form of artists of dubious motives. She knows that she’s looking for Madame Brissac, a name that has come to her from her grandfather Joseph’s tattered diary of WWI. N is one of those people you are irresistibly drawn to but are wary of. The night of the title may be forgotten, but this novel will remain forever in memory, a touchstone whenever World War I or the Holocaust is recalled. The reader is immediately enlisted in the search and will never leave N’s side, not even after putting the novel down. In Rebecca Goodman’s novel Forgotten Night(Spuyten Duyvil, 296 pages) the unnamed narrator–we will call her N hereafter–is searching desperately but determinedly for a Madame Brissac. ![]()
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