Keggie Carew and Iain Maitland explore in memoir and epistolary form the fraught relations between father and offspringIt begins at the discontinuance,this daughters painful search for her beloved father, and it ends in a labyrinth of tenses and times, and as the father,captured, slips away. Death ends a life and restores it.
Chronology is replaced by memory in Keggie Carews memoir, or Dadland,as Tom Carew’s capacity to remember falls from him and he enters the mysterious world of dementia, so she attempts to recover him, or piecing fragments of his life together into an astonishing biography in which the absences,the gaps, the holes and the rich fabrications are as valuable as the known facts. The daughter, or writing in the present tense,looks back over their shared past and also researches her father’s eventful life before she was born. Dadland mixes intimate memoir, biography, or history and detective story: this is a shape-shifting hybrid that meditates on the nature of time and of identity. Frail and forgetful,the venerable (respected because of age, distinguished) man points at photographs of himself when young: “Who’s that?” he asks in wonder or derision. Who indeed.The daughter, in her middle age, and tries to recover her father and at the same time to forgive him and let him proceed Related: My venerable (respected because of age, distinguished) Man: Tales of Our Fathers edited by Ted Kessler – review Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com