Remember Me: A Novel [Paperback]

Trezza Azzopardi (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0802141765 | ISBN-13: 978-0802141767 | Publication Date: January 7, 2005

The much-anticipated second novel by the Man Booker Prize finalist and national best-selling author of The Hiding Place is a harrowing, elegant, and vivid portrait of a lost life at last reclaimed. Winnie would say she's no trouble, content to let the days go by, bothering no one. Living on the edge of nowhere, she'd rather not recall the past and, at seventy-two, doesn't see much point in thinking too much about the future. But when her closed existence is shattered by a random act of violence, Winnie is catapulted out of her exile. Robbed of everything she owns, she embarks on a journey to track down her stolen belongings-but soon finds her search has become the rediscovery of a stolen life. As Winnie pieces together the fragments of her life, her once-secluded world begins to fill with people: her devoted father; the haunting figure of her mother; her domineering grandfather; and Joseph, her only love. At last Winnie understands that she has not escaped from her life at all; she has simply been circling it. Now she must come to terms with the final revelation, one so profoundly shocking that she had concealed it even from herself.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this odd and moving second novel from Azzopardi, whose first novel, The Hiding, was a Booker finalist, a thief makes off with a small case containing some useless relics belonging to an elderly homeless woman—variously called Patricia, Lillian and Winifred, depending on the people who "care" for her. Patricia's search for the thief and her belongings becomes an excavation of her past, beginning with her prewar girlhood in the English town of Chapelfield; it's a haunting evocation of neglect, abuse and mental illness. Born with a head of spiky red locks that her dad refers to as "telltale" hair, the "feeble-minded" Patricia is passed off to her grandfather (after her depressed, delusional mother dies), then, during WWII, sent to live with a bitter, lonely aunt on a scraggly farm. But when 15-year-old Patricia gets pregnant, she's shuttled back to Chapelfield, only to discover that all her relatives have disappeared. It's a harrowing, painful story, saved from melodrama by the unsentimental first-person perspective and a challenging, elliptical narrative. The backstory, revolving around the telltale hair, is slow to emerge, but as the pieces of the plot begin to fall into place, the book gains sweep and power, building to an unexpected (and unexpectedly horrifying) climax. The prose has flashes of brilliance—"the rain is a river of silver coins"—and while some readers won't respond to the fatalistic acquiescence of Patricia/Lillian/Winnie, they can't fail to be moved by the sadness that shrouds this largely lost life.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Booklist

Azzopardi's canny sense of the link between trauma and mental instability shaped her first novel, The Hiding Place (2000). In her second, she hones both her craft and her insights to create a darkly mystical tale of loss, betrayal, and disconnection. Her narrator, Winnie, a homeless woman in her seventies, is a compelling yet enigmatic narrator whose memories of her painful past are abruptly reawakened when she is robbed of her precious few possessions. The reader is carried back to her lonely childhood, when she was known as Patsy, then Lillian, and farmed out to unloving relatives in the English countryside after her mother commits suicide and the Nazis begin their bombing blitz. Considered simpleminded, she suffers every sort of deprivation and is at everyone's mercy, including a lustful shoemaker and a Svengali-like couple who transform her into a crowd-thrilling clairvoyant. Azzopardi's prose is spellbinding. Her rendering of a soul unmoored is keenly poignant. The mysterious and involving situations she conjures are fairy-tale-like in their haunting harshness and deep resonance, and her subtle questioning of our notions of identity, family, and the claims of the dead make for a profoundly contemplative read. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (January 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802141765
• ISBN-13: 978-0802141767
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,255,883 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Truth is, as you get older, things get further away", March 16, 2004

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Remember Me: A Novel (Paperback)

Memory, suffering and loss are the themes of this rather abstract and densely imagined book by Trezza Azzopardi. I can't say this is one of my favourite books of the year - the story takes a little too long to develop and Azzopardi's method of switching backwards and forwards in time becomes, at times, a little blurred. But the story is still a quite elegant and engaging study of one woman's anguish and torment and of the puzzle of a life at last reclaimed. Narrated in the first person by the seventy-two-year old Winifred - homeless and abused time after time by those she's trusted - she is content to sit on park benches watching the world go by, or read the "free sheets" for furniture she can't afford to buy. She would rather not recall the past, but after a young girl robs her of her suitcase and wig - her only material possessions - she is propelled out of her exile, and forced on a journey to find the thief.

Remember Me is a cerebral venture, a journey of the mind and memory. Winifred must confront her stolen life and her time living as a young girl against the backdrop of the Second World War. In fragments and illusions, she is gradually forced to take stock of how abuse, long obscured have bought her to a dilapidated house on the edge of nowhere. She recalls the upheaval caused by her mentally ill Mother, and her disaffected father; and the betrayal by her strict and domineering grandfather, her embittered, sallow Aunt Ena and the kindness offered by the lodger, Mr. Stadnik. She also recalls Joseph Dodd, her lost and only love, a young man who she meets in the country. As Winifred pieces together her life, she realizes that she is not only searching for a thief, but she is searching for a life that was lived, and at once, irretrievably lost.

Remember Me requires a close reading as Azzopardi peppers the narrative with many subtle and understated clues to Winifred's life. The story unfolds slowly and mellifluously as Winifred's identity and her "mistakes" are gradually revealed. Like her Mother, Winifred feels an affinity with the spirit world and is trained to see ghosts -she sees herself in reflection, "the girl looking back at me from underneath, like a premonition of what was to come" Winifred sees "future ghosts", memories stored on top of one another; she's building a "tower without bells" and later, she will bring them down in an earthquake of her own making. Full of poetic imagery, Remember Me draws a sharp contrast with the dreamlike quality of Winifred's youth and her ambling, wondering and solitary present life. Azzopardi uses short, sharp, yet incredibly descriptive sentences to create a world of reverie and emotion. This is a complex and opaque novel, full of feeling and passion.

Michael

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A LOVELY CADENCED READING, May 7, 2004

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Remember Me (Audio CD)

Trezza Azzopardi burst upon the literary scene with a hauntingly beautiful novel, "The Hiding," which was a Booker finalist. Her initial work was a heads up that here was a new writer of note. She undergirds our original assumption with "Remember Me," an equally compelling story related in lovely measured cadence through the voice of Winnie who narrates her life in flashback form.

Corrie James presents a splendid reading, capturing perfectly the voice of an elderly homeless woman who is lost in the world. Winnie has precious few material possessions and suffers trauma when they are stolen from her. She begins a search for the thief and as she does so recounts a past of pain and disillusionment.

Born to a mentally deficient mother and uncaring father the girl is left with a grandfather and later foisted off on an aunt. There comes a time when she is a teenager when all she knows of relatives in this world are gone. Thus begins a downward spiral during which she becomes a pawn, used to satisfy the greed and lust of others.

The tale sounds depressing yet it is anything but as it is uplifted by Azzopardi's elegant prose and Winnie's gumption.

- Gail Cooke

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tender and gentle, the story of a innocent, June 5, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Remember Me: A Novel (Paperback)

Welsh-born Trezza Azzopardi has followed up her remarkable debut novel ("Hiding Place") with one that shows maturity and skill in addition to a gentle empathy with her characters. The narrative is related by an old woman who is what was once called "simple-minded." Passed around as a child amongst adults who alternately love, use, tolerate and scorn her, she struggles to make sense of events in terms she can understand. Painfully aware of her "differentness", she learns to ride the hard times patiently and fight back only when pushed beyond endurance.

Azzopardi has cleverly allowed the thoughts of her protagonist, as expressed in the story, to be articulate and perceptive, although the character struggles to express herself out loud to others. The result is a sustained level of tension with poetic imagery that never becomes overwrought or maudlin.

By the end of "Remember Me", Winnie has made her peace with the world, and neither wants nor needs our sympathy. Nevertheless, we should be ashamed that she was based on a real life "resident of the streets", one of those forced to squat in abandoned buildings in the middle of so much affluence.