Nostalgia is a dystopian novel by M. G. Vassanji that focuses on the dangerous power of memory in a world where death is, essentially, nonexistent and almost definitively meaningless. In a futuristic Toronto (and North America in general), a caste system of sorts has emerged. In the “third world”, the citizens are depicted as cannibalistic ‘savages’ who are able to enter North America only in infinitesimally small numbers (I recognize the problematic nature of using such terms, but it does seem to apply in the world of exacerbated inequality of the novel). In North America, there are two groups, as well. The lower in the hierarchy are people who were naturally born, have actual families, and have limited opportunities to enter the workforce because most of the jobs go to those who are ‘rejuvenated’—people who had previous lives that they’ve abandoned for something new. Since life is essentially endless, ‘rejuvies’ are people who felt the crushing weight of previous memories and needed to escape, so they are reconstructed both outside and in. They are given memories and all their previous life is meant to be forever sealed off—but memory has a way of bubbling up.
Leaky Memory Syndrome, aka Nostalgia, proves fatal, particularly when entwined with government conspiracies. You are not supposed to remember the pink elephant rolling a grapefruit. So, a new form of doctor has emerged—-a doctor that patches holes in rejuvies’ new psyches and medicates to ensure repression. Vassanji introduces the central premise of the text early on:
“From as long back as we can imagine, we humans have striven for immortality. Now that, in our rough and ready way, we’ve begun to approach it, we face the problem of what to do with the vast amount of information we carry. Even if the brain allowed such storage capacity, who would want to be burdened by quantities of redundant, interfering memories? Painful and messy ones? Therefore as regeneration techniques advanced to allow the body to last longer, mind renewal grew alongside. The term is colloquial and inaccurate, of course—what is a mind, after all? No matter, as someone quipped. In fact, it’s selected portions of long-term memory that we renew. New memories in new bodies. New lives. That’s the ideal, though we are still far from it. The body may creak and wobble; memory develop a crack or hole. In the leaked memory syndrome, or Nostalgia, thoughts burrow from a previous life into the conscious mind, threatening to pull the sufferer into an internal abyss” (7).
This brings us to the central character, Dr. Frank Sina. He himself underwent the procedure that replaced all his previous memories and now serves as one such doctor, consulting with people who want to be reborn and people who struggle with repressing forbidden memories. Frank Sina (where’s the missing ‘tra’ on his name?—this actually is relevant, I think) engages with a patient named Presley whose leaky memories seem oddly resonant: it’s midnight, the lion is out. As Presley reveals his few leaky memories, Frank seems to have his own imagination run away with him and finds himself getting wrapped up in a much more sinister plot.
The novel has an engaging premise. The idea of rewriting old memories for essentially immortal people is a valuable thought experiment in the value of memory in general. The world of the novel allows for all kinds of exploration into deeper issues and themes, ranging from colonialism to class to race to religion to mortality. For instance, there’s an extraordinarily compelling section where Dr. Sina is consulting with a woman who wants to be reborn. It is essentially a conversation about suicide because she’s giving up everything, including her loved ones. The faith that she has in her (basically) reincarnation proves to override any deterrents towards a more traditional suicide. The philosophical implications really draw me in in that respect.
A question that emerges to me is: what responsibility do we have to our future selves? What responsibility do we have to ourselves when we don’t exist yet?
In Nostalgia’s world, reincarnation is a mixed blessing verging on a curse. It’s unpredictable; you don’t know which of your qualities will be transferred or what your new situation will be, though it’s implied that you’ll land reasonably safely into a new career. The question then becomes: how is this different than death? Your old self is eradicated, your new self is completely disconnected from your past self’s expectations. You’re a new person that knows some version of you used to exist. Vassanji offers at least some justification for why the impulse would be desirable, though he could go further in exploring the implications. Understandably, people might feel compelled to escape their memories, but the incentive to start fresh when you won’t experience it seems a little senseless. It’s only towards the end of the novel that Vassanji reveals that your past self passes along funds to your future self to help them land safely, which I guess gives some assurance of well-being in their new life.
The philosophical implications of the novel are worth deeper consideration, but so too are its narrative possibilities. For instance, there are sections where Frank, our narrator, recounts beautiful memories of his parents and childhood. Yet, you know these memories are fake. They’re a story invented by someone whose job it is to create new lives. It’s a twisted approach where the narrator is unreliable to himself and to the audience. It’s also an engaging idea that you might have memories but not be able to see them; memory becomes something more felt than seen or lived.
It’s possible to view the book in terms of recent technological developments, as well. Though it was written in 2016, it’s prescient of things like ChatGPT. (Has anyone asked ChatGPT to write its autobiography?). AI is a life form of sorts, compiled by memories of others, memories that become its own, despite it never having any authentic experience of them. It’s fitting that one of the central characters in Vassanji’s work is an AI program with whom Frank dialogues. Yet, it has the agency to track what he does and offer privacy when so requested. The use of AI as a device is an effective parallel to the more humanistic (or posthumanistic) concerns of the novel as a whole.
Incidentally, Vassanji seems to have a knack for finding meaningful parallels from the cultural zeitgeist. At one point, Frank is being threatened and Andy Warhol’s repetitious Elvis painting appears in view of his office. It’s a clear reference to Frank’s dealing with the patient Presley—a little on the nose, but it’s more nuanced than that when you also consider that both texts deal with a repetition of identity. Just as Elvis is replicated ad nauseam, the people in this story are repeated, albeit nonidentically, rather than allowing themselves to die.
I’ve scratched the surface of the story’s premise, but there are a number of layers that are worth discussing. I’m going to attempt to avoid spoiling central plot points, but be warned that it may occur. Frank Sina is dating a young woman named Joanie, who is having an affair behind his back and who is secretly part of a growing protest movement that calls for older people to off themselves to make room for the younger, naturally born generation that finds itself devoid of opportunities. Meanwhile Frank meets an Indian woman who is part of a pseudo-Hindu movement that encourages people to naturally die and repair the karmic cycle. One of the members of her group self-immolates—in more ways than one this book reminds me of Unless by Carol Shields—and Frank finds himself engaged in religious and spiritual exploration alongside his new friend. Meanwhile, a reporter named Holly Chu has gone to Maskinia, the nation of cannibalistic poor people. While reporting there, she is kidnapped, presumably eaten—but she reemerges as a convert calling for understanding for the anti-Western-decadence militaristic group, of which she is now a part. Meanwhile, Presley tries to maintain his leaky memories and the government pressures Frank to find his client and report his whereabouts. In short, there’s a lot going on.
While I enjoyed the novel overall, there’s an element of its structure I found somewhat disagreeable. While alternating between the other storylines, Frank writes in a journal, initially digitally, but fearing the AI reporting him, he switches to writing by hand. The journals recount stories about Holly Chu and Presley and explores their previous lives. The alternating narrative approach was and is in vogue, but here it felt largely unnecessary. Of course, by the end of the novel all the threads weave together. Fair enough, I suppose, but it was a little too predictable how everything would fit; suggesting the hidden narrative would have been enough.
Stylistically, the book was well-developed. I initially found it off-putting, perhaps because you’re thrown into the text immediately. (Is this Heidegger’s thrownness at work? Is that the experience when you are reborn mid-life?). Really, I think it’s because the second sentence is a fragment with many clauses and little context: “A stray thought like a foreign body, an impurity in his mind, a banner floating cheekily against the sunny blue of his normalcy” (1). The more immersed I became in the novel, the more the style agreed with me. The presentation of the dialogue also led to some interesting opportunities. In a conversation with his unfaithful partner, Frank narrates the following: “The edge in the tone, that silly response shouted guilt to me. And I replied mutely, It matters, but it doesn’t matter, because I know. And you know that I know” (18). Due to the lack of quotation marks, there’s a moment of ambiguity—what does he actually say? Moments later it becomes clear that he did not say ‘the quiet part out loud’, but there’s that brief moment of doubt. It’s a stylistic way to reflect this ambiguous border between there-and-not-there, and while subtle, it felt like it added to the thematic consistency of the book.
The book was probably the closest thing I’ve read to a page-turner in quite some time. While it’s a high-concept novel, it remains grounded enough in reality and engaging enough in its plot that it works as a pretty versatile novel. There are lots of points of entry and I could see it being incorporated as a dystopian novel in a high school English course. It would certainly lead to some interesting and meaningful conversations.
Hey, do you remember an animal from the start of this review?
The book sets up the danger of thinking and the danger of memory. If I ever write my dissertation, it will be about the epistemological and political concerns of nostalgia in fiction and here there’s a very clear risk involved. On the topic of unwanted thoughts, “the trick then is not to try and understand them, unravel the thoughts—that only feeds the syndrome and revives those dead circuits in the brain—and brings more of them back. And you don’t want that” (16).
There’s also a clear parallel with the idea of the value of fiction. Lives themselves are fictions that have purpose: “To our eyes, every life story is one more narrative, to be examined for structure and meaning and coherence; for its utility. And then a life enters your life, your heart. It’s no longer just a narrative, it’s your ache, moment by moment. That’s what had happened to me” (21). Vassanji qualifies that we are just narrative. Life and stories are experienced differently, but it’s clear that fiction has just as much value for enabling us to go on—in this book, literally so: you are given a fake backstory so that you can keep on living.
To me, there’s a lingering question that the book does not yet address satisfactorily. It seems a central problem that memories are connected to others—i.e. one memory is connected to another one, and one person’s memories are connected to other people. We do see some of the way in which one person’s memories awaken memories in someone else, but it just seems unlikely that an individualized memory-replacement program would be possible to contain. I suppose that’s why memory leakage occurs, but when everything is so connected to everything else I can’t fathom ever being able to isolate memories and reprogram new ones. Imagine, for example, if Proust’s madeleine were erased from In Search of Lost Time. I guess that’s why the world of Nostalgia is an all-or-nothing game, but the containment of particular memories just seems impossible. And what if you were to encounter people from your previous life? Also, there are some things that we have collective memories of—shared knowledge, shared experiences that would always need to be accounted for. How profoundly isolating it would be if you were not given a memory that serves as a touchstone for everyone around you—-I suppose that’s why the generation gap emerges as a problem in the novel, since everyone has different cultural memory and has been alive for different lengths of time.
That was a bit of a tangent, but the pink elephant on the beach has nevertheless lingered with you, hasn’t it?
Anyway, I really liked this book. While the ending petered out more than I would have hoped, there is enough substance in the core concepts of the book and the intrigue of the plot that I found it really compelling. Ironically, Nostalgia will likely remain in my memory for quite some time.
Happy reading, folks!
No comments:
Post a Comment