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Discussion Questions
1. Compare the way food is associated with recollection and reflection in The Persistence of Memory to other books and movies that have used similar techniques, such as Like Water for Chocolate. It is clear that Paul is culturally sensitive when it comes to his choice of cuisines, but does his culinary diversity mean he is unprejudiced? How does Paul interact with nonwhite South Africans on a social and economic level?
2. Discuss the effects of Paul's sudden suspension of memory after witnessing the Owamboland atrocities. Do you begin to lose faith in the accuracy of Paul's memory in the wake of this gap in the narrative, or is our faith in his powers of photographic recall actually strengthened by these events?
3. Of all the books and movies about Apartheid and South Africa, The Persistence of Memory is unabashedly written from the point of view of a white man of British descent. Compare this to Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom, in which the story of anti-apartheid agitator Steve Biko (played by Denzel Washington) is told through the lens of a white journalist (played by Kevin Kline). What does it mean in this book to have the "memory" of South Africa come from a British source, rather than a white Afrikaner or a black South African?
4. How does Paul cope with the many ethnicities (white, British, Jewish) to which he belongs? How does his religion complicate his experience and our interpretation of the book?
5. How does the literary technique of memoir writing form our perception of Paul and his fellow characters? How does Eprile's narrator compare to other famous fictional memoirists such as Lionel Essrog, the detective afflicted with Tourette's syndrome in Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, or Salman Rushdie's protagonist in Midnight's Children?
6. Even though Apartheid only ended in the early 1990s, this novel describes a world that seems ages apart from our own. Did the book explain the pressures and motivations at that time for white people to accept Apartheid?
7. Looking back on Paul's testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, discuss the implications of a perfect memory for disciplines that require documented evidence, such as history and court proceedings. In what way does personal perception shape what we consider to be the truth? Could the testimony of a perfect memory be considered an accurate historical record?
8. Can we read anything into Paul's close relationship with his mother and her two marriages? Is it symbolic that Paul's father was an exterminator?
9. Discuss the death of the father and its impact on Paul. The details of the scene are surprisingly vague given Paul's remarkable memory, and they stand in stark contrast to the gruesome details of Lyddie's massacre in Owamboland. Was his father's death a suicide? What role did the father's affair with Corinthia, the maid, play in his death and Paul's memories of the event?
10. How does anti-Semitism enter into the story? How does Paul handle anti-Jewish sentiment? Is he discriminated against because of his faith?
11. Paul begins the remembrance of his father by harking back to his grandfather. In what sense is Paul's character defined by the memory of his family?
12. Do you think Major Lyddie and Paul will have any further interaction? How do you think they might react to one another if they were to meet by chance outside of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's chambers?
13. How do you respond to Paul's conclusions about the state of South Africa at the end of the book? Do you think Paul has made an accurate assessment of the political situation?
A Conversation with Tony Eprile
The narrator of The Persistence of Memory describes himself as having "a poisoned gift, a picture-perfect memory." What led you to choose a protagonist with a perfect memory, and how did this help you write about the complexities of South Africa?
I can trace my narrative decision to a specific occasion. It was my first visit back to my birthplace after a prolonged absence, and I was continually struck by how white South Africans had recast their memories to fit in with a changing political climate. The year was 1990 and I was listening to my former upstairs neighbor wax nostalgically about the time my parents were arrested and she had sheltered my brother and me for several days. On the day the police simultaneously raided our apartment and the office where my father edited a black newspaper, my mother asked this neighbor to . . . drive us to school. (We each carried briefcases filled with my father's sensitive papers.) In the intervening years, this modest change in our neighbor's car-pool routine had grown into something nobler, her gesture of support for those in opposition to Apartheid.
The larger distortions of memory were evident everywhere. Take the former mixed-race area of Sophiatown, which had been razed to the ground and rebuilt as the Afrikaans suburb of Triomf, Triumph. Even the beautiful murals celebrating the people of Sophiatown had been whitewashed over, so white churchgoers would not be disturbed by images of the people they had displaced.
Shortly after this visit, I read The Mind of a Mnemonist by the Russian psychiatrist A. R. Luria, an account of a man tormented by a perfect memory. It got me thinking about the limitations of memory, the ways we distort our recollections, the difficulties of knowing what really happened. In a repressive society that constantly sought to impose its own mythology on the past, what would happen to someone who could not stop himself from remembering everything? And so my narrator was born.
But you put the book aside for ten years; why is that?
The main reason is that events in South Africa were moving a lot faster than my own imagination. Instead of the political crimes of the past being hidden or swept under the rug (as in Argentina, for example), throughout the nineties they were presented almost as a theatrical spectacle before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, one of the most interesting and unusual attempts by a society to record the "truth" of the past. The Truth Commission has its detractors, but, overall, it was a remarkable and important social experiment. I felt I had to grapple with the Truth Commission in my own way within the novel, hence my protagonist, Paul Sweetbread's appearance before the TRC.
Do you have a perfect memory?
Not at all. But exiles tend to hold on to their memories very tenaciously, fixing a place, time, and people into memory the way you might "fix" a photograph. The people who stay wind up rearranging their memories, rather the way one might rearrange the furniture in a lived-in house and then think the bed was always in that corner, the picture always on the wall.
In the novel I try to explore different ways that we store—and, invariably, distort—our memories: photography, film, tape-recording, the "official histories," the stories and jokes we tell, the very words we use. Our words and expressions are another form of collective memory—in fact, every month or so friends will send me nostalgic lists of South African slang that are doing the rounds of the Internet. Food, too, is another form of memory that is an important element in the story I tell.
The Persistence of Memory is written in a very intimate, first-person voice. Is the novel autobiographical?
The short answer is: no. I was fortunate in having a family who were strongly anti-Apartheid, and my parents constantly pointed out the inequities of the racially stratified society we lived in. My father edited a black newspaper—his friends and colleagues included some of the top black editors and reporters, and Nelson Mandela even showed up at our home when he was in hiding from the police. So, I had the usual privileges associated with being a white South African but also the unusual privilege of seeing the other side at an early age. I wanted to explore what it was like for an ordinary, decent South African Jew who grew up without that background, who had to figure out what was wrong with his society for himself, his only tools being memory and the willingness to pay attention. I also wanted to show that it is impossible to live in a position of privilege in an oppressive society without becoming implicated yourself.
How is your novel different from other post-Apartheid novels?
Americans are most familiar with the works of J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, two writers I admire tremendously and whose works have influenced me, but whose literary approaches are different from mine. My real influences, though, are the eastern European writers—Hasek, the author of The Good Soldier Schweik, and the humorous side of Kafka. (Some readers have likened Persistence to Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, a comic novel about dark and serious subjects.). I've tried to respond to Apartheid with satirical humor—to undercut the pieties of racism by showing its absurdities.
Also, the formative experience for men of my generation and a little younger was the secret war in Angola and the occupation of Namibia. There have been a fair number of books on the topic in South Africa, but mine is the first novel dealing with this issue to appear on this side of the Atlantic. The story of soldiers trying to act as peacekeepers while being resented as occupiers is all too timely, given the current situation in Iraq.
It was eerie writing the Namibia scenes while the United States was gearing up to invade Iraq. Here, my character was suffering heat, extreme cold at night, attacks by insects, and the hostility of the local population of an arid country. When South Africa invaded Angola in 1974 (with U.S. help), the army was predicting victory in less than two weeks. The conflict continued for fifteen years and hugely damaged all the countries involved, which should certainly give us something to think about today.
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