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While I'm reading a book, I'm often aware that my perception of time gets a little warped because story time can run much faster than the time it takes to read it. This imbalance can leave me a bit disoriented when I lay the book down and adjust to the fact that it's still the same day as when I began reading though years may have gone by for the characters among whom I've spent the last hour or two.

While reading this book on the other hand, real time passed much faster than story time. And story time moved so very slowly that my reading pace slowed down too; I'd frequently realise that I'd been on the same page for a long time, that I was in a sort of suspended mode, not reading, hardly thinking, quite numbed. The image of a Salvador Dali painting came to mind several times while in that suspended mode, the one where the clocks, all stopped at a particular moment in time, are slowly melting away.



It is not only Dali's warped clocks that reflect my experience with this book, it is also the title of his painting: The Persistence of Memory. The narrative voice is obstinately persistent, and 'remembering' is its obsession. I say 'narrative voice' rather than narrative voices because, although there is a chorus of voices, they all sound the same. They sound the same because they are mediated to the reader for the most part through the voice of the narrator. She reports what they say. When they are allowed to speak directly, it is very refreshing, and if, as on a few occasions, the narrator gives the reader a little view of them as they speak, it's like manna in the desert:
Yet it is not what I feel myself,�� Angeliki said, rearranging the lovely grey tissue of her sleeves.
That little detail about the sleeves showed me the character for the first time when her long long story, reported by the narrator, had failed to make her real for me.

The persistently relentless telling that makes up so much of this book mostly concerns one theme: fractured relationships and broken marriages. In all of the stories related to this theme, there is a defining moment, as if each character's personal clock had stopped at just that moment. Years may have passed but they remain obsessed with remembering the incident, and seem to have an endless need to talk about it, a compulsion verging on lunacy. And the irony is that it is the lucidity of the narrator’s probing questions that prompts the outburst of lunacy every time.

Lucidity and lunacy. That pairing of words which sound similar while being very different, echoes the wordplay the author uses to mark the beginning and end of this otherwise serious narrative. In the early pages, a character mistakenly uses the word prolixity for proximity. His slip-up is funny because it is already clear to the reader that he is going to be tediously long-winded. At the end of the book the same character uses the word solicitude when he means solitude. That brings in a little humour again because this character has in fact been maddeningly over solicitous during the course of the book, a behaviour which causes his solitude in the end. Neat.

The conch shell on the cover is neat too. Like a human ear. Relentlessly listening...