by johan

The collection’s most overtly autobiographical pieces form a poignant distillation of the paradox inherent to the memory palace: that the past, once lost, can never be fully recovered; that the vestiges of it that do remain, in memory or material reality, are irrevocably altered, twisted willfully or otherwise beyond recognition. For “Port of Greifswald”—an extended observation of nature again recalling Sebald—Schalansky set out to walk the length of the river Ryck, which flows through Greifswald, the town where she was born. She retraces a childhood haunt through adult eyes, testing her own powers of recollection, observing the effects of years of change to the landscape, and thinking back to the ancient wilderness which this urban environment has replaced. As she walks, she notes down everything she sees, describing plants, animals, landmarks in concentrated, lyrical detail. Although she is following a map, she is really traversing a path back through her own life; as the unfamiliar landscape—grasses, ditches, fields of deer—suddenly cedes, and she finds she is walking past the hospital where she was born. In “Von Behr Palace,” which recalls the burned-out mansion on whose land Schalansky’s childhood home was built, her earliest memories come back to her as she conjures the sounds and textures of the places where she grew up.