Book 4: Memory
Task: Connector
Assigned: John Vincent Amoguis
Although an only boy child, for many years I had a brother. Holiday friends and casual acquaintances had no option but to take my word for it. I had a brother. Stronger and better looking. An older brother, invisible and glorious. I always felt envious when I went to stay with a friend and a similar-looking boy walked in. The same disheveled hair and lopsided grin would be introduced with two words: "My brother." An enigma, this intruder with whom everything must be shared, even love. A real brother. Someone in whose face you discovered like features: a persistently straying lock of hair, a pointy tooth... A roommate of whom you knew the most intimate things: moods, tastes, weaknesses, smell. Exotic for me who reigned alone over the empire of my family's four-room flat.
A friend finally shares with him the missing piece, the secret that has haunted his parents, and that shaped him with a permanent sense of loss. Nazi-occupied Paris is the setting of this spare novel, and France's betrayal of its Jewish populace, is among the subjects. It is related in emphatic prose. Sentences that feel less written than stamped on the page, the language driven by anger, by loss, but and also by gratefulness. This story does double-duty. It is not only enriches by adding something to one narrative, its telling lightens the load for another. It is not surprising to discover that Grimbert is a psychoanalyst whose currency is personal narrative, as it is used to define, to know, and to unburden. It's a striking work, well worth the reading.
Task: Literary Luminary
Assigned: Jay Ford Gonzales
“The vigor I lacked for physical activities became incandescent when, pen in hand, I filled those pages with invented stories. Sometimes they were intimately about me – family tales, parental exploits – sometimes they became horrific stories sprinkled with torture, death, and reunion: crazy games and tear-soaked sagas.”
― Philippe Grimbert, Memory: A Novel
― Philippe Grimbert, Memory: A Novel
Sometimes, in our life, we are very creative, dynamic, and even imaginative. Yet, unconsciously, all of those wild imaginations come true. I chose this passage to the fact that life is just like this. We could not savor life unless it comes from 1st hand experiences. Through ups and downs, thick and thin, goodness or hatred, pleasure or unpleasured, life is a matter of seeing everything the way as it is in the brighter side. WE must be optimistic and not the opposite around.
“The day after my fifteenth birthday, I finally learned what I have always known.”
― Philippe Grimbert, Memory: A Novel
And part of the devastating truth he learns: the stuffed dog he adopted once had another owner in the family’s household. Another life came before his. – these are just some of the thought he had discovered after his fifteenth birthday.
Through this passage, I came to the point of thinking whether in my 19 years of existence are all of me right now are real or just a mere nothing. This passage struck me a lot not because I regret of what I didn’t have since then, but because I’m afraid to know whether everything is just a dream. I learned so much, I achieve that much, I fall that most, yet I’m fully able to do things according to God’s will.
Task: Vocabulary Enricher
Assigned: Rhea Nova Tindugan
- · Pallor (page 7) – paleness, esp. of the face
- · Superb (page 7) – grand, excellent; of the highest quality
- · Spindly (page 7) – tall and slender; frail
- · Pollarding (page 7) – pruning system in which the upper branches of a tree are removed, promoting a dense head of foliage and branches. It has been common in Great Britain and Europe since medieval times and is practiced today in urban areas worldwide, primarily to maintain trees at a predetermined height.
- · Samovar (page 7) – a metal urn w/ an internal element used for boiling water for tea, esp. in Russia.
- · Solar plexus (page 11) – in the network of nerves behind the stomach.
- · Dilapidated (page 17) – in a state of despair, shabby.
- · Agile (page 22) – quick and nimble in movement; mentally acute.
- · Prodigies (page 29) – an extraordinary person, thing or act; a gifted child.
- · Penury (page 35) – extreme poverty; want.
- · Demarcation line (page 35) – boundary or limit.
- · Bucharest (page 45) – the capital and largest city of Romania, in the southeast part of the country on a tributary of the Danube River. Founded in the 14th century, it soon became a fortress and a center for trade between Wallachia and Constantinople.
- · Suburb (page 45) – an outlying part of a city or town
- · Kohl (page 46) – a fine powder, as of antimony, used for darkening the eyelids.
- · Juddered ( page 52) – vibrate violently
- · Fidgeting (Page 53) – moving restlessly; nervous restlessness.
- · Brasserie ( page 70) – bar and restaurant
- · Impeccable ( page 79) – without defect or error; faultless
- · Shatter (page 81) – to reduced to fragments suddenly; to damage or be damaged severely.
Task: Summarizer
Assigned: Mary Grace Apdua
The last book we had taken up was the book of Philippe Grimbert. A novel which pictures out the memory of the young man and the memories he had when he was a child. Memory that he hold until he grew up. A child on the man who wrote this novel. In this slim, bleak second novel, French psychoanalyst Grimbert fictionalizes his wrenching family history, hidden for much of his youth
My task here was being the “Summarizer”.
Here is the summary from Amazon.com.
Grimbert himself -- going on about the imaginary playmate he created in his mind when he was a child. It's a catchy opening -- "Although an only child, for many years I had a brother" -- but he does seem to go on about it a bit much.
Sickly, thin, weak -- he's even excused from P.E. at school because of his health -- the young Philippe is no prize physical specimen -- in marked contrast to his physical-fitness-fanatic gym-rat parents, who are constantly working out, and "whose every muscle had been buffed and toned, like those statues in the galleries of the Louvre". The early sections of the book focus on the child, growing up in post-war France (he was born in 1948), and it doesn't seem particularly remarkable: he's a bit of a bookish outsider, he fantasies about how his parents fell in love, he sees himself as something of a disappointment to them.
The book reaches its nadir when he describes his difficult birth:
I survived, thanks to the care of the doctors and the love of my mother. I would like to think that my father loved me too -- overcoming his disappointment and finding in care, worry, and protectiveness enough to stoke his feelings. But his first look left its trace on me, and I regularly glimpsed that flash of bitterness in his eyes
To imagine a father's first glimpse of one as a just-born infant -- and to see in it only disappointment -- is a pretty large burden for a kid to carry around -- and for an author to force on his readers. But there's a payoff for all these early, slightly self-pitying sections, as it turns out Grimbert does know very well what he's doing.
In his teens Grimbert begins to learn about the war-years, in school and from a family friend. He's aware of a bit of his family's background -- the grand-father that fled Romania -- but when he asks his father about, for example, the origins of their name his father brushes him off. There's no discussion of the substitutions made a few years back:
But of course M for mute hid the N of Nazism, while G for ghosts vanished under taciturn T.
(Yes, the Grimberts used to be Grinbergs.)
Grimbert finds:
I was constantly bashing up against the painful wall with which my parents had surrounded themselves, but loved them too much to try to climb it, reopening the wound. I had decided not to know.
Truth will out, however, and the Grimberts certainly do have some secrets tucked away in the attic..... The family friend, Louise, who spent the war-years in Paris finally slowly, begins to fill in all the missing pieces for Grimbert, and these are some pretty devastating huge slabs of past that get unearthed. It's a stunning story, a huge burden that his parents have long carried around with them -- and one that is difficult for the adolescent Grimbert to deal with. Suddenly a lot is seen in a new light (right down to the imaginary brother the young Grimbert insisted on).
Perhaps the only way of dealing with it is in doing what Grimbert has done with this book, trying to recapture what happened in such a neutral, simple tone, short sections, short sentences, without much embellishment. There's considerable invention here: Grimbert has to re-imagine almost all of it -- he wasn't there, and neither was his main source, Louise, for most of it -- and in this way sets a very personal stamp on the narrative. This is the version he can live with, in a sense -- though it's the simple facts, which remain the same regardless that are of course what's most difficult to take.
As if his parents' story wasn't enough, there's more, a coda of sorts -- though Grimbert can barely go there. There's a second family tragedy, one that a grown Grimbert is much closer to, but he can't do much more than describe what happens in a brief paragraph, wondering what the last words his father had murmured into his mother's ears were, unable to bring him to consider much more surrounding that act.
Secret is an absolute tragedy, an almost perfect example of the form, with Grimbert's presentation making for a very moving, powerful, and personal work. Grimbert is manipulative: there's art behind the work, but also craft, as he unfolds the story in a very particular way -- and, ultimately, to very good effect. He's perilously close to presenting a well-rounded course of psychotherapeutic sessions, brought to their conclusion, getting it all into the open, going through it, putting the pieces in place, but it's not a completely closed story: Secret remains his story (of how he comes to terms with it), rather than his parents'; how they deal with it still leaves a terrible open end to it too.
Secret is a well-presented, deeply unsettling, and fascinating story.
Task: Character Captain
Assigned: Steven Jay Silah
Macaulay Culkin as Philippe Grimbert/Grinberg
He kept the secret until; he was eighteen when their dog Echo died. The dog’s death triggered the memories back. And he told everything to his father that freed his conscience, as well as to his mother.
Tom Cruise as Maxime Grinberg
He was a seductive man and a gym goer. He was very conscious of his body figure. He married Hannah but was so distracted by Tania’s image in his mind. He is the father of Philippe and Simon.
Christina Aguilera as Tania Grinberg
She is a very beautiful and stunning woman. She maintains her body through swimming which eventually becomes her sport. She loves to sketch. She was Robert’s former wife and Maxime’s second wife. She is the mother of Philippe.
Brittany S. Pierce as Hannah
She is a very loving mother and a devoted wife. She was Maxime’s first wife and the mother of Simon. She’s plump – the evidence of being a caring mother.
Mike Chang as Simon Grinberg
He was the real mirror of Maxime’s beau. He was greatly loved by the people around him when he was still alive.
Burt Hummel as Joseph Grinberg
He is Maxime’s father. He is a worrisome old man. He did not like the union of Maxime and Tania but accepted that his son needs someone to hold on after Hannah and Simon’s loss.
Santana Lopez as Louise
She was in her sixties. She is alcoholic and a chain smoker. She was Philippe’s parents’ masseur.
Task: Discussion Director
Assigned: Ma. Cherry Ann Clarin
The following questions are inspired from the story.
1. If you were one of the characters in the story, who would it be? Why?
I will take the role of Louise. She is a family friend. I find her role interesting and exciting. She is outside of the family yet her role was a major twist in the story. When she unfolded the secret to Philippe, he was able to start a life now that he almost understood his parents.
She is Maxime and Tania's masseur so she holds secrets. I think keeping secrets is interesting.
2. In the story, Hannah and Simon were arrested and brought to concentration camps. Later, news arrived that they died on gas chambers. Was the event Hannah's fault? Explain your answer.
I actually cannot blame Hannah for her reaction. She knew all along her husband's admiration to her sister-in-law. So when she found out she was there, she got depressed. Only that, I think emotions should be tied tightly. I just realized that when someone gets too emotional, he cannot think straight. So it's her fault.
3. If you were to change a part of the story, what part would it be? State the events.
Philippe (now older) already had unraveled his family secret, lifted the burden of his father (who previously had a wife Hannah and a son Simon taken to a chamber gas in Auschwitz, Poland – murdered because they were Jews) – the burden of desiring his sister-in-law the time he and Hannah married to the days they were taken away, and chased his mother’s ghost – that Hannah and Simon will come after their lives.
Philippe now had a daughter and one summer evening, he decided to go back to the woods surrounding the castle near their house. He once was there but did not get any closer. This time he had finally decided to explore the area. He discovered a little cemetery behind the castle before.
He and his daughter approached the stone slabs and read the epitaphs.
(The reading-the-epitaphs scene is my favorite part.)
As they read the stone slabs, running their fingers on the decades-aged graffiti, the left imprinted evidence of the mass graves, some of the carcasses butchered and massacred, a name caught Philippe’s keen and observant eyes. He ran his fingers over the embossed letters. Blew few breaths to it. Removed strands of vines that hinder his perceiving.
A tiny bolt of electric current run over his body that made him shiver.
Hannah – 194*.
He rummaged on the stone slabs beside it, behind it, the one next to the other and voila!
Simon – 194*.
He finally found them.
