PositiveMusic and Literature... one of the most striking things in this book is the way that its protagonist simultaneously exists in so many different versions of time, as in he is almost thinking of or writing about some other time than the time he currently inhabits, he is a person almost entirely devoid of the present, as he himself (Antonio Jose Jiménez) several times confesses that nothing in the present is able to touch him or is real for him, and yet the novel is so invested in its own relationship to time that it arranges itself along a series of at-first mysterious signifiers ... there is nothing saintly about Antonio except his almost religious desire to understand at the same time as he erases or tries to erase certain memories even as he tries to regain them, this desire to make some sense of what has happened to his family, what has happened to his life, all the while portrayed so elegiacally, shot through with mercurial beauty and enormous stylistic ambition in this novel, Aphasia , the life of a writer’s mind.
