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- Verified Buyer
Years ago, when I worked in a leading London department store, I remember being intrigued by a fellow staff-member. I never knew her name, or which department she worked in, but she had an interesting face, one whose folds wrought by age concealed secrets about her personality. That memory continually sprung to mind as I read Tatiana Salem Levy's THE HOUSE IN SMYRNA (2007), published first in Brazil and appearing for the first time in English eight years later.The story seems straightforward - a seriously ill narrator gets up from her sick-bed and goes in search of her familial roots from Brazil to Turkey. She visits Istanbul and then Izmir, which she prefers to think of by its former name, Smyrna. Her family lived there before being forced to migrate to Brazil. She looks for the key to her old house, but finds that it has been knocked down. With to real reason to stay in Turkey, she visits Portugal before returning home.Within that deceptively simple plot Levy makes some important metaphysical analyses of the impact history makes on human life. Facts melt into fiction and vice versa so that we find it impossible to separate the two. A present action evokes memories of what we did or did not do in the past; likewise the actions of our loved ones. Occasionally it is impossible to evaluate whether such actions had pleasurable or painful consequences - perhaps they had both. The book describes sensations reminiscent of Romantic poetry in its evocation of pleasure followed by pain and symbolic death. Or perhaps Levy is just imaginatively reflecting about death, inspired by the need to purge unattractive memories from her narrator's consciousness.The narrator finds several rusty keys on her visit to Smyrna, but none of them seem to open any doors. On the other hand she finds an imaginative key to her ontological struggles: while they can never be erased, it is wisest to accept them for what they are. We understand how the past is never finite; try as we might, it continues to exert a significant influence over our present behavior, and we are perpetually revisiting it. There is no such entity as an actualized or even an invented past (as historians would have us believe); it relies on our willingness to look into ourselves and understand how it shapes our lives. That explains why it is so pleasurable and yet so painful. Autobiography and fiction represent two ways of dealing with such struggles. While writing defies all attempts at categorization, it can nonetheless provide at least temporary resolutions.How does the experience of reading THE HOUSE IN SMYRNA relate to my memories of the department store? As I read Levy's text I understood something about the mysteries of history that we continue trying to answer but can never solve. Our memories of the past are too complex to do so. Writing history represents at best a temporary truce with ourselves; like all peace strategies it can be readily broken by all participants - writers, readers, as well as those trying to explore the recesses of their minds. Yet that knowledge doesn't stop us wanting to revisit the past, even if we have to accept rather than resolve its paradoxes. This is the true key to unlock the HOUSE OF SMYRNA.
