Memory and forgetting

Memory and forgetting are both the subject of Sofia Papastergiadis’s abandoned doctorate and a force shaping how she understands illness, family, and her own place in time. The novel makes recollection less like a stable archive than an embodied, contested process: Rose Papastergiadis’s symptoms and memories reach Sofia through years of caregiving, while inherited histories surface in therapy, family scenes, and objects that remember what their owners would rather leave behind.

Bodily memory and family inquiry

Sofia’s investigation into her mother’s health began in childhood and has lasted for about twenty years by the time she narrates it. At four, she asked what a headache meant; Rose described it as a door slamming in her head. Sofia came to regard herself as a mind reader because Rose’s head seemed to have become her own, with its repeated slamming doors making her both witness and interpreter. The image joins memory to bodily sensation: pain is not an abstract medical fact but a phrase and experience that Sofia carries forward.

The investigation has financial as well as emotional stakes. Rose’s house has been remortgaged to pay the twenty-five thousand euro cost of treatment at the Gómez Clinic near Carboneras. Sofia frames her effort to decipher symptoms, triggers, and prescribed medicines as detective work, wondering whether an unsolved illness makes Rose the victim and someone or something the villain. Yet every apparent lead gives way to another unexplained symptom and another medication. British doctors have even prescribed antidepressants for Rose’s feet, supposedly for their nerve endings. Sofia’s anthropological training offers a way to examine stories and patterns, but not a solution that can make the accumulating history coherent.

At the clinic, that history refuses a straightforward chronology. During Rose’s physiotherapy assessment, Julieta Gómez listens as Rose describes a family past that includes a father whose high energy might be mistaken for mania and a mother whose suffering might be mistaken for depression. Sofia already knows this history but does not want to feel connected to it. Rose’s account moves among present illness, childhood illness, and earlier family experiences; Julieta will later transcribe it into a case history. Sofia observes that there are more than twenty complaints, not one or six, and that past, present, and future seem to be present in them together. The clinical task of recording symptoms thus meets a form of remembering that will not stay in its allotted time.

Testimony, bodies, and the archive

Sofia’s position in these sessions is uneasy. She agreed to be present at Julieta’s request on the understanding that she would otherwise be free from the treatment, but her freedom comes at the cost of listening to Rose’s words. At times she withdraws behind headphones and watches a buffering 1972 David Bowie concert on her shattered laptop screen. The split between her physical presence and her attention makes a question of witnessing: she has been asked to hear, yet she is also trying not to be drawn into the family history being spoken beside her.

Julieta becomes the keeper of an audio archive containing Rose’s confessed childhood and some of Sofia’s own secrets. Sofia wonders whether memories are held in Rose’s bones and muscles, and asks why the work is called physiotherapy. Julieta replies that Sofia is the expert because her thesis is on cultural memory. Their conversation turns Sofia’s academic subject back toward the material under examination: what passes from one generation to another may be preserved in recorded speech, but also in the body and in the listener’s reactions. Sofia admires Julieta’s interviewing skill and reflects on an earlier informant who had become disoriented when Sofia interrupted him. Listening, in this account, is not passive; the interviewer can help a story continue or break its course.

Rose’s present account of illness likewise demonstrates how testimony changes with the body. She tells Sofia that she reported a chronic degenerative condition to the doctor, who admitted knowing little about chronic pain and said that Rose’s pain had not yielded its secrets. Rose says the pain magnifies every day, while her feet are numb. The discrepancy between pain and numbness does not settle the history; it adds another condition to be carried forward. Sofia’s recurring attention to water follows a similar caregiving impulse: even beside the hum of the injury hut’s small fridge, she thinks about bottled sparkling or still water and how to make it more suitable for her mother. Care repeatedly converts observation into a private record of what Rose might need.

Inheritance, identity, and the wish to forget

Memory also travels through family relationships that Sofia did not grow up sharing on equal terms. In Athens, she remembers having forgotten to tell Christos Papastergiadis that memory was the subject of her abandoned doctorate. His household is making new memories, but Sofia sees it as possibly stable or possibly unstable, anchored by faith. Christos has left his former life and, Sofia understands, knows he must forget that it ever happened; she experiences herself as the remaining obstacle between that life and his new one. Forgetting here is not simply a failure of recall but part of a difficult rearrangement of family identity.

The contrast is sharpened by the household’s language. Christos sings to Evangeline in Greek; Sofia imagines that her half-sister will learn the language and its twenty-four-letter alphabet from her father. Evangeline will learn to say Papa and mean it, while Sofia describes herself as having a better ear for her mother’s language of symptoms and side effects. The passage sets inherited speech and affectionate repetition against the vocabulary of illness that has formed Sofia’s own intimacy with Rose. Memory is transmitted, but not evenly: one child receives a language of belonging, while the other has learned to attend to bodily complaints.

A smaller, more unsettling instance of remembering appears in Ingrid Bauer’s embroidered silk top. Ingrid seems startled when Sofia names Hannah, as if she has forgotten that she herself named her sister during the night she gave Sofia the garment. The needle, however, has remembered: the word Beheaded remains stitched into the fabric. Sofia recognizes that she is no longer an impartial researcher, because she has become involved with her informant. The garment makes private history visible and durable, while the conversation exposes the gap between what Ingrid wishes to forget and what her own act of making has preserved.

Narrative time and the limits of knowledge

Sofia’s research into cultural memory is also a way of describing her own disorientation. In a conversation with Juan, she discusses the possibility of going to the United States to finish her doctorate. Asked where a thesis on memory would begin and end, she admits that she is often lost in time: the past can feel nearer than the present, and the future can seem already to have happened. The account makes the problem of research inseparable from the problem of narration. A beginning and an ending may be necessary to a thesis, while lived memory brings different times into the same present.

The novel’s recurring images intensify that instability. Sofia’s headache recalls the door slamming in Rose’s description; later, when she has a headache herself, she responds by pressing her fingers to her forehead and eyes. A phrase first learned as part of her mother’s pain returns as a bodily experience of her own. Elsewhere, the word Beloved becomes painful when Sofia watches Evangeline cherished by the family; she connects it with Beheaded, making love and injury echo one another. These returns do not prove that the experiences are identical. They show how an image or phrase can be carried into a new scene and acquire a different weight.

At the end of the novel’s confrontation with caregiving, Dr Gómez tells Sofia that children of mournful mothers may ask themselves why a mother seems dead while still alive. He connects that fear to Sofia having left Rose in the middle of the road and insists that Rose’s life and legs are hers: if she wants to live, she may walk out of danger, and Sofia must accept her decision. Sofia recognizes that it had never occurred to her that Rose might not want to live. Dr Gómez calls her confusion wilful and warns that she is finding a home in ignorance. The exchange gives forgetting an ethical dimension. A daughter may learn her mother’s symptoms with extraordinary precision and still fail to know what her mother wants; remembering is not the same as possessing another person’s experience.

Significance

The concept binds together the novel’s medical, familial, and anthropological strands without allowing any one of them to settle the others. Rose’s body carries histories that clinical transcription can organize but not resolve; Julieta’s recordings preserve testimony while Sofia’s listening remains partial; and family objects and repeated phrases retain traces that their makers or inheritors may resist. Memory can be intimate and inherited, deliberate and involuntary, useful to care and inadequate as a claim to know another person. Forgetting may enable a new family life, conceal a painful name, or become a refuge from responsibility. The tension between those possibilities shapes Sofia’s investigation and its final demand: to remember carefully, she must also recognize the limits of what she can know or decide for Rose.