Word: livesey
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Quayle famously reminded us, a terrible thing to lose one's mind. But in Margot Livesey's disappointing new novel The Missing World, mind is lost, and for some, the loss is a cause for celebration...
...when Livesey portrays that most vulnerable side of Hazel Ransome's mind under attack, our natural impulse is to fear for her safety. Hazel, the amnesiac at the center of things, loses her memory, and in an improbable web of deceit, her ex-fianc Jonathan scrambles to keep it hidden. During a phone call with Jonathan, Hazel goes unconscious for a short while, slips into violent seizures, then reawakens with no memory of the last three years. Those three years were traumatically eventful-she fought with her lover over his infidelities, moved out of his apartment and appeared...
...memory), but in the end the book says little about memory, except that we can on occasion have a love-hate relation with our own sense of the past. At one point Jonathan wonders whether it might have been better if both he and Hazel had lost memory. Livesey has rightly called into question the value of memory per se, but only after too much excessive and extraneous complication...
...when Livesey announces, in a note at the book's end, that she has drawn inspiration from great memory scholars such as Frances Yates, Jonathan Spence, A. R. Luria and Harvard's psychology department chair, Daniel L. Schacter, one wonders how she could have sapped those wonderful writers of their vitality. In comparison to Livesey, Luria's account of the Russian mnemonist Sherevskii is refreshingly direct and insightful, and there is more to learn about memory from a chapter of Spence's Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci than from the whole of this failed comedy. What this ultimately shows...