PositiveThe Georgia ReviewThe raging sea that is this book is forcefully unsentimental, yet overflowing with compassion ... In Memory of Memory is openly and carefully working in a specific tradition of many greats who have previously bushwhacked through these dense groves. She knows she is writing in a place that \'began with Proust,\' then \'continued with Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and ended with Sebald’s prose.\' In Memory of Memory is a book whose light is not consumed by those great shadows ... The pulsing heart of the first two thirds of the book are in what the author playfully terms her \'Not-a-chapters,\' where she steps out of the way to let her ancestors speak directly through their correspondence with each other. The thing about letters is that most of their meaning is contained in what’s not written. Stepanova can set context...but what she cannot do is fill in the gaps of the argument the sender and recipient had in the months preceding, and why forgiveness is being begged ... She is driven, as we all are, to follow trails. To dig up small secrets. To piece them together not to tell a story of what was, but what is. Make of it what you will.
