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| Memory: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Philippe Grimbert
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $3.80
You Save: $16.15 (81%)
New (38) Used (21) from $3.35
Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 408964
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 160
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 4.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 141655999X
Dewey Decimal Number: 843.914
EAN: 9781416559993
ASIN: 141655999X
Publication Date: February 12, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Twenty years after his mother and father jumped to their deaths from a balcony, Philippe Grimbert has written a gripping novel about the hidden memories that dominated their lives. A colossal bestseller in Europe, Memory is the story of a family haunted by the secret of their past: an illicit love affair, a lost child, and a devastating betrayal dating back to the Second World War. The day after my fifteenth birthday, I finally learned what I had always known.... Growing up in postwar Paris as the sickly only child of glamorous athletic parents, the narrator invents for himself a make-believe older brother, stronger and more brilliant than he can ever be. It is only when the boy begins talking to an old family friend that he comes to realize that his imaginary sibling had a real predecessor: a half brother whose death in the concentration camps is part of a buried family secret that he was intended never to uncover. A spare, erotic, and ultimately cathartic narrative, Memory is a mesmerizing tale of coming to terms with one's shameful past through the unraveling of a series of dark desires.
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| Customer Reviews:
 another take on the holocaust August 11, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Philippe Grimbert's tale of French Jews who avoided deportation in WWII focuses attention on the destructive force of the holocaust on survivors - not death camp survivors but those survivors who found safety in unoccupied France. It is a story that, as a reader, one takes as biography rather than fiction because the emotions are so "spot on." Certainly the author's profession - psychiatrist - served him well.
To tell the family story, the events of WWII are portrayed as a family secret, revealed to the narrator as a 15-year-old. These missing pieces / family secrets further a coming of age theme; they also narrate a love story. But all that is secondary to the exploration of the effects of the holocaust on one extended family.
chilling, poignant and shocking April 20, 2008
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
Beautifully written, heartwrenching yet hopeful. These true stories are what children need to read to remind all of us about the horrors of the Holocaust.
 A Holocaust Story as Reflected in the Next Generation's Identity March 27, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Philippe Grimbert's novella, MEMORY, might more aptly be titled, SELF-DISCOVERY. A best seller and multiple prize winner in France, this short and eminently readable tale recounts in fictional form the author's discovery of his Jewish identity (the family name had been carefully modified from Grinbert to Grimbert by his father) and that of his parents and the rest of his family. Heavily intertwined and propelling the family history of his parents' and grandparents was, of course, the story of Nazi Germany and Vichy France.
At the outset, Philippe is the 98-pound weakling son of parents Maxime and Tania, who are both paragons of physical beauty and athletic skill. Young Philippe sees ever-present disappointment in his father's eyes, so much so that he invents an imaginary and physically robust older brother as his protector. An incident in school during a classroom discussion of the Holocaust leads fifteen year old Philippe into a fight where he is beaten by a much larger classmate. As a result, the family's long-time friend, a woman named Louise, decides to reveal to Philippe the long and complex story of his unknown past.
Needless to say, that past is full of surpises and horrors, at least one of which is reminiscent of Styron's SOPHIE'S CHOICE. Philippe's parents are not entirely who he has believed they were, and he learns further about past family members whom he never knew existed. To say any more would be to reveal spoilers unnecessarily.
Grimbert's novella is neatly packaged, a chronological coming-of-age and coming-of-personal-awareness tale wrapped around Louise's account of the Grinberg/Grimbert family experiences during World War II. Dogs - real, stuffed toy, and buried in a pet cemetery - play a symbolic role in the story, as (perhaps a bit too neatly) does Maxime's and Tania's facility with diving.
One is tempted to argue that the same Holocaust story has been told many times before, just as the Cultural Revolution story from China has been recounted in so many different ways. What can be left still to say? Yet when all is said and done, MEMORY effectively adds another small chapter to the full story and reminds us once again of the devastating choices such horrors force upon both victims and perpetrators. Perhaps what makes this book different is that we see the Holocaust events one generation removed. Grimbert displays their after-effects as imposed on a young man who was not yet born during that turbulent era and who must view everything he learns through a lens that simultaneously informs who he is and corrects his beliefs about who and what he thought he was.
Memories, individual and collective March 11, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Grimbert's novella explores memory on at least two levels: through the narrator's retelling of his family's trauma during World War II and subsequently; and against the backdrop of the Vichy regime under the direction of Pierre Laval. France's shame for the latter is revealed in brief strokes; in a classroom, for example, in which teenaged children circa 1963 laugh (nervously? uncomprehendingly?) at a film that depicts broken bodies in one of the death camps; in a cemetery on Laval's former estate in which the family dogs have been lovingly buried.
These dogs stand in contrast to two dogs belonging to members of the narrator's family--one that is stuffed and is discovered hidden away in an attic; another, named Echo, who is killed by a car. The narrator, primarily through discussions with a family friend, pieces together the secret, or secrets, that haunt the family over the decades that follow the war.
At the heart of the book is a love story whose contours would merely be melancholy but common in a normal time; within its context, however, it takes on a tragic cast. That story propels the reader through this brief, affecting book.
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