Books like So Long, See You Tomorrow

My heart was sliced to ribbons by this story. The narrator, an elderly man whose boyhood was scarred by a horrendous event, attempts to make sense of it all – and to make amends, as he tells it – 50 years down the road during the course of writing his memoirs.In his memoirs, he talks about his childhood in Lincoln – about losing his mother to the influenza outbreak of 1918. He vividly recalls where they (his father, brothers and himself) lived and how they coped with their loss in their individual ways.He talks about their home, and how more changes happened once his father re-married. He talks about his school years, his friends – and most of all, he bares all of his childhood feelings from his now 50-year cushion of safe distance in the future.Through his memories, I felt like I was on a guided tour of history with my hand held snug and warm in his grip. He does warn me, however:”What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.” (Quote from the book; emphasis mine.)So what we readers blithely label (and often dismiss) as an unreliable narrator is most likely every narrator who ever told a story. In other words, there is no such creature as a \ reliable narrator.\ This led me to understand that if a “reliable narrator” is what I am looking for in the stories I read, I am likely to be disappointed again and again.The narrator in this book goes a step or two beyond that. Because they were young, and his friend Cletus’ father murdered a neighbour, the narrator goes on to weave his own memories further to include vividly coloured threads of what might have been happening in Cletus’ family as well as the family of the person murdered.Despite his warning, despite knowing that he is inventing most of the story, I was completely under the spell of his tale. The emotions are real, the descriptions of two marriages falling apart and failing to re-form in similar or even different configurations are so tangible that I could have been there myself. I wanted to take some of the characters and shake them up; and others I wanted to protect with the ferocity of a mother lion defending her cubs.William Maxwell’s writing is beautiful – straightforward, raw, immediate – it infiltrated my life like a song whose notes resonate so perfectly with one’s heart and soul that its refrain echoes in memory over and over again.