The History of History by Ida Hattemer-Higgins
Knopf • $24.95 • ISBN 9780307272775
21 January 2011
The History of History, a debut from American expat Ida Hattemer-Higgins, is something of a concept novel: Her protagonist, Margaret, awakes in the woods outside Berlin with a large gap in her memory. Two years later, she receives a mysterious summons from a doctor who calls herself a “memory surgeon” and wants to help her remember. The next day, the city is transformed “into flesh”—its internal, repressed history somehow represented in its reality. As Hattemer-Higgins explains, “It can be read either as Margaret’s . . . personal story, or it can be read figuratively as a fable of a nation that wakes up slowly, after two decades of amnesia, to a recognition of atrocities in its past.”
Whether such an ambitious premise can be sustained through the course of the book remains to be seen, but Hattemer-Higgins sets a fairy tale tone in the novel’s evocative opening.
The oceans rose and the clouds washed over the sky; the tide of humanity came revolving in love and betrayal, in skyscrapers and ruins, through walls breached and children conjured, and soon it was the year 2002. On an early morning in September of that year, in a forest outside Berlin, a young woman woke from a short sleep not knowing where she was. Several months of her life had gone missing from her mind, and she was as fresh as a child.
What are you reading this week?
I am reading “Just Kids” by Patti Smith.
Murder at the Washington Post by Margaret Truman. I have read most of the series over the years. I found a “new copy” at a used booksale in Louisville this fall, and have gotten back into her parallel-stories,and great character depiction.
I am reading ‘The Valcourt Heiress’ by Catherine Coulter.
I’m currently reading 2 books simultaneously (I’m a Gemini, after all). John Sandford’s thriller, Mind Prey and Pleasure’s Edge, by Eve Berlin (pseudonym of author Eden Bradley).
I just finished “My Reading Life” by Pat Conroy. What a beautifully written book. The author has always been surrounded by the love of words and how they affect readers. The book is a journey into his life as a reader and an author.
I am just starting “Hell’s Corner” by David Baldacci. The Camel Club is back and this is a great thing! Baldacci is one of the authors that I have a hard time waiting for the next book.
I am reading “Fall of Giant”. Also just started “Murder on the Orient Express”
Just finished Appetite for America by Stephen Fried, now reading The Prostitutes Ball by Stephen J. Cannell.
I just started reading Bound, by Antonya Nelson, a
writer I have just discovered and am so happy to have
found!
I am reading Cold Sassy Tree, published in 1984, but a great novel if your are from the South or have roots there.
I am reading The Girl Who Kicked the Horney’s Nest and Death on the D List.
I am reading Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff and very much enjoying the research she has done to portray Cleopatra in a more realistic light versus the sensationalistic versions of the past. For starters, she was not even Egyptian! Why has history always portrayed powerful women so negatively? A fascinating, eye-opening read!
reading Late,Late at Night,by Rick Springfield