Shoalzheimer: Raphaël Sigal

You chew all of that

The beginning of Raphaël Sigal's Geography of Forgetfulness (Laffont, 2025, Prix Méduse) bears the telling title “Fausse route” – a reference to the process of detours, the wrong start, the impossibility of finding the “right” approach. Sigal does not begin with a coherent family history, but with the admission of failure, which is inscribed into the text itself. The opening passage is paradigmatic for the entire novel: it establishes the crucial motifs – memory and forgetting, silence and speech, Jewish ritual practice and literary poetics, distrust of fiction and, at the same time, the inescapable inscription into the fictional.

The first sentence – “Je grandis dans une famille sans histoire” – is already a palimpsest-like product of revision. Originally, it read “J'ai grandi…”, a closed past tense, which the author consciously replaced with the open, continuous present tense during the writing process. This small shift points to the core problem: every past tense freezes experience into an image, a static representation that does not do justice to the reality of the survivors. “Verbs in the past tense statify scenes, forcing them into a framework that reeks of novelism.” ¹ This suspicion of fictionality is fundamental. Sigal searches for a "grammaire" and "lexique" that would allow him to write about events without revealing them.

In order to give the narrative the "intensity of the experienced moment," the narrator tries to rid himself of the past and transform the fragments of memory into a "warm and malleable" Präsens“ (présent chaud et malléable) to pour. But also the sentence "I grew up in a family without a history" doesn't work. Although the passé composé is mentioned by name, the use of past tenses is generally considered problematic, as it makes the scenes too rigid and gives them a novelistic feel. The text therefore oscillates in its drafts between the rejected passé composé, the equally unworkable present tense, and even the conditional, which is meant to establish "the possibility of narrating what was not communicated to him."

The family meal scene that Sigal describes is initially embedded in the Jewish ritual of the Seder. The symbolic foods—lamb bones as a sign of sacrifice, the bitter herbs for the suffering of the ancestors, the charoset as mortar, the salt water for tears—refer to the biblical story of the liberation from Egypt. Sigal describes how this ritual simultaneously overlays the historical experience of one's own family: "You chew all of this to internalize, from childhood onward, the dramatic story of the biblical ancestors, overlaid by the story of real ancestors, which is constantly reaffirmed over the generations." ² The intertwining of liturgical commemoration and familial trauma constitutes the dual memory that the text seeks to map.

The ritual itself is performative: one reads, sings, discusses, laughs, remains silent, and above all, one eats. Sigal insists on the physicality of remembering: "We read our history, we sing it, we discuss it, we devour it." ³ History is not merely narrated, but inscribed through the mouth, through taste, through the gestures of libation. Memory here is somatic, yet also fragile, constantly interrupted by laughter, fatigue, and disturbances. It is precisely in these ruptures that the "bouts de phrases" appear, which the narrator describes as his legacy.

The grandfather utters these fragments: “I risked my life (they died); I could have died (they died).” ⁴ Sigal interprets these fragments by putting “mes mots d'adulte” into the grandfather's mouth: “I am dead and I am sitting here at this table telling you how I escaped death and lived through it.” ⁵ Herein lies the dilemma: The grandfather's testimony exists only as a retrospective translation by the grandson. It is always already mediated, already written, never authentic. At the same time, the tension between the grandfather's eloquence and the grandmother's silence is staged: "My grandmother is there, she says nothing." ⁶ In this polarization – fragmentary speech here, silent absence there – the family history continues as a legacy of the gap.

The scene takes an eerie turn when the silence at the table becomes "like the smoke column of an invisible fire." ⁷ The image of the smoke cloud evokes associations with the Shoah, ashes, and burned bodies—and simultaneously with the pillar of cloud that, in the Exodus myth, leads the people of Israel through the desert. Here, biblical narrative and historical annihilation overlap once again. The smoke is both memory and obliteration, precisely the tension that Sigal would later encapsulate in the term Shoalzheimer.

The chapter also addresses the relationship between memory and fiction. Sigal makes it clear that every written account, every reconstruction, is caught in the web of fiction: "Every time I write down the words of this taciturn grandfather (and let the unspoken resonate in the background), I become entangled in the webs of fiction." ⁸ This skepticism towards fiction stems from an ethical stance: Sigal refuses to "fictionalize" the Holocaust. He vehemently distances himself from Benigni. Life is Beautiful, which he perceives as "clownery", and from Spielberg's Schindler's Listwhich he considers "irresponsible". His central verdict is: "You don't invent stories about camps and extermination." ⁹ He thus positions himself in the discourse on the representability of the Shoah and joins a tradition of authors and theorists who understand fiction as a dangerous distortion (cf., for example, Susan Suleiman, whom he quotes: “I am not able to read novels about the camps – what I want and need are events that are remembered, even if they are distorted or blurred.”).

The text thus oscillates between autobiographical ambition and poetological self-blockage. The narrator explains: “As soon as I put the family history down on paper, doubt overcomes me. I doubt that I can write anything about it at all.” ¹⁰ And further: “C'est toujours trop écrit, les mots figent les corps et les postures.” ¹¹ Writing threatens to destroy the living, to transform it into a rigid, false representation. Therefore, Sigal searches for a language that does justice to experience without betraying it. The attempt to shift from the passé composé to the present tense is one such attempt at rescue: the events should remain perceptible as a living present, not as a museum piece of the past. But even the present tense offers no way out: "But it still doesn't work, the fiction still crackles, there's no escape." ¹²

In the end, the scene itself remains indigestible. It is described like a meal stuck in the throat: “This family meal becomes a fantasy, nourished by the dreams and fantasies of others. I experienced this scene, but once written down, it is unbearable. It is too written to be experienced. It opens a book I want to write, and the book refuses to emerge. It remains stuck somewhere between stomach and throat.” ¹³ This metaphor once again makes the body the stage for remembering: the book itself is inside the body, it has not yet been brought forth, it is like an indigestible morsel that cannot be swallowed.

The novel's opening is thus a dense staging of the fundamental problem: the oscillation between memory and silence, ritual and trauma, testimony and fiction, past and present. It already reveals the aesthetic form that will characterize Sigal's work: a writing that constantly reflects on its own conditions, questions itself, and remains in the tension between testimony and the impossibility of bearing witness. "Fausse route" is therefore not a deviation, but rather the text's very program: writing about the Shoah and the family legacy is always a detour, a false path that can only be traversed in allusions, fragments, in the superimposition of Bible and family history, in the simultaneity of the Passover Seder and the remembrance of death.

Double annihilation

Geography of Forgetfulness Raphaël Sigal's work explores inherited silence, family secrets, and the impossibility of capturing his grandmother's story without the pitfalls of fiction. The author grapples with fictional memory ("mémoire fictionnelle") and the tension between his grandparents' unimaginable experiences and the necessity of representing them in writing without constructing false images. He inherits only fragments of sentences and hazy memories, leading him to attempt his grandmother's autobiographical narrative in the first person, strictly limiting himself to using only what she actually conveyed to him in order to respect her code of silence.

Hélène Cixous has in many texts – especially in Osnabrück or Les rêveries de la femme sauvage – understood her own writing as a movement between life, memory, and loss, sustained by that which cannot be narrated. She describes a “feminine writing” defined by ruptures, physicality, the unconscious, and a surplus of logic and narration. Characteristic is her insistence on writing from absence: from her mother’s silence, from her father’s death, from a Jewish-French-German liminal existence.

This is where Sigal begins. When he refers to Cixous, it is to legitimize his own project: writing born from scarcity, from the "stumps" and "fragments" that remain. Cixous offers him a model for how to create literature from gaps without betraying those gaps. Just as Cixous develops a poetics of translation, displacement, and shifting from the linguistic mixture of her heritage (German, French, Arabic), so Sigal forms a poetics of forgetting from the fragments of family memory. The motif of the mother tongue is particularly important in Cixous's work. She writes: "I have always written in my mother's language, which was the language of the Other." ¹⁴ —and this shift is a defining element. Sigal's grandmother also moves between languages: German, French, and Hebrew as a liturgical language. The reference to Cixous allows him to process this linguistic exile in his writing.

Furthermore, Cixous repeatedly emphasizes that writing is a form of mourning. It's not about telling the "true" story, but about the Working on the lossIn this sense, Sigal reflects her attitude when he explains that he does not conduct research and adds nothing that was not directly passed on to him: "What she never told me will not be in the book." ¹⁵ This too is a Cixousian gesture: respecting silence, settling into not-knowing, transforming stillness into a literary voice. To put it pointedly: the reference to Cixous makes it clear that Sigal's Geography of Forgetfulness within the realm of a poetics of silence and trace that developed in Cixous's work. He does not write against emptiness, but with it; in his grandmother's silence, he sees not only loss, but also the place from which writing itself becomes possible.

The characters in Sigal's novel are genealogically linked. At the center is the grandmother, doubly deprived of her life by the Holocaust and Alzheimer's disease. The grandfather speaks sporadically in fragments, such as the sentences about the family's dead in Poland: "You know, in Poland there were 150 of us, 147 died." ¹⁶ The father becomes the mediator, naming the illness but perpetuating the silence surrounding the past. The narrator, as grandson, assumes a dual role: he is the heir to the gaps, but also the one who gives them literary form. In "La règle du je," the author defends his method of writing without archives and the "sensuality of substitution" ("sensualité de la substitution"), even when accused of "excessive fiction." He writes about the "nostalgia for what never happened to him" ("nostalgie de ce qui ne m'est jamais arrivé"). It is noteworthy that Sigal marks the female line as particularly reticent: "They tell a little about their childhood, their youth, their success. They tell nothing. As if they had never had a life." ¹⁷ The gender difference here intertwines with the logic of forgetting: women appear as bearers of an even deeper silence, which is both inaccessible and obligatory to the narrator.

At the heart of the narrative lies the concept of two kinds of forgetting: on the one hand, the grandmother's involuntary forgetting due to Alzheimer's disease, which slowly erases her memories, her humor, and her language. On the other hand, an active, voluntary forgetting, necessary for her to continue living as a survivor of the trauma (the Shoah), a "silence that transmits the memory of the trauma as powerfully as screams and whispers." This active forgetting is unconsciously passed on to the next generation as a "crypte" or "phantom." To name this dual nature of forgetting, the author coins the neologism "Shoalzheimer," which merges the unspeakable trauma and the disease that define the grandmother's final years.

This excerpt describes the decisive moment and the narrator's central methodological challenges in constructing his book. The grandmother is physically present (on her sofa), but also literarily present (in the book), her existence defined by love and forgetting. She is the subject of the writing, yet she herself no longer perceives its content: "Elle ne voit pas de quoi ça parle" (She doesn't see what it's about). Faced with the emptiness of her memory, the narrator imposes a strict rule on himself to "respect her silence": He reconstructs her childhood solely from the few fragments of her story ("quelques lambeaux de son histoire") that he has inherited. He forbids himself any research, exploration, or questioning of his father.

The author realizes that the book must be modeled on his grandmother's condition: "Comme elle oublie, le livre doit oublier aussi" (As she forgets, so must the book forget). The narrator despairs at how to convey the feeling of forgetting and fears that falsifying reality ("truquer la réalité") is inevitable, even though it contradicts his desire. Since he knows almost nothing about her actual memories, he cannot even imagine what exactly she is forgetting.

Where concrete facts and memories are lacking, the text becomes a "fantasmatic edifice," populated by "sepia-toned individuals," well-behaved children, and a vast library of German classics. The narrator observes a literary distancing: the closer he gets to his grandmother ("Plus je me rapproche d'elle"), the more he distances himself from his own words. He describes the few remaining memories with a "flood of adjectives," which he uses as support to prevent the fragile plant of memory from collapsing.

The interpretation culminates in the description of the specific literary strategies he employs to articulate the emptiness and the silence: “Je m’accroche à des symboles” (I cling to symbols): symbols serve as a substitute for the lost or unknown facts (like the children’s book Struwwelpeter, which he uses in the book to establish a connection). – “J’ajoute des points de suspension” (I add ellipses): These represent what has been said but is cut off, the unspeakable, and the lost. – “J’abuse des blancs” (I misuse the spaces/paragraphs): The excessive use of spaces and paragraphs serves to physically represent the silence and absence of memory on the page. These techniques are attempts to capture the unspeakable and the gaps in the family history in literary form, by making the text's form reflect the fragmentation of memory.

The author uses the term "crypte," which, in the context of the psychoanalytic theory of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, describes the mechanisms of trauma transmission. According to this theory, survivors "bury" ("enterrer") a traumatic and unspeakable experience in a "crypte," which is then passed on to the next generation as an "unknown phantom" ("fantôme inconnu"). Those who bear this unconscious burden are called "cryptophores" (crypt bearers). Using this metaphor, the author, Raphaël Sigal, understands that secrets and "cryptes" can be made visible. He recognizes that the inherited, encrypted ("crypté") code of silence, which he attempts to decipher, transmits not memory, but rather forgetting ("l'oubli").

The narrator eventually comes across his grandmother's own manuscript, titled "Ma vie" ("My Life"), which she wrote as her Alzheimer's disease progressed. In this text, which the author feels has been "stolen," her German childhood memories and her lingering anger toward Hitler are expressed. This autobiographical fragment forms the uncorrected core of the book. Despite her illness and attempts to repress the trauma, the grandmother concludes her text with the statement: "The war is over. Yes, perhaps, but I cannot forget it." The author understands that his own book must serve to make this authentic, unreadable text of his grandmother audible by uncovering her "geography of forgetting" and thus processing her twofold legacy of silence.

Communication in Sigal's novel is characterized by breaks, omissions, and repetitions. The grandmother remains silent, or she speaks in endless loops that convey nothing. "My grandmother is there, she says nothing." ¹⁸ This concise statement becomes the leitmotif. But in the gap left by the silence, the grandson's projection begins. He fills the silence with his own words, he puts sentences in his grandmother's mouth that speak of fantasies of revenge: "I would have liked to have died and let them die with me... to have swept these criminals away in the maelstrom of revenge with Kalashnikovs." ¹⁹ The author underscores the violence of this intervention when he notes: "I force the unthinkable into her mouth to alleviate my sadness." ²⁰ In this novel, communication is not an exchange between two subjects, but rather a movement of overwriting, substitution, and filling a void. It is precisely this that makes it precarious, because one's own speaking is under suspicion of betraying the strangeness of silence.

Sigal situates his writing within an intertextual discourse that is itself shaped by the question of how the Shoah can be represented. He rejects the “clownery of Benigni” and the “irresponsibility of Spielberg” and instead refers to Georges Perec’s concept of a “fictional memory” and to Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie and Ma mère ritThese intertextual references illustrate that Sigal's text does not stand in isolation, but is part of a collective search for ways to represent the unspeakable. Within this tradition, Shoalzheimer takes on a dual meaning: as an individual term encompassing one's own family history, and as a contribution to a literary discourse on memory, trauma, and language.

Shoalzheimer

The text's metaphors revolve around bodies, language, and objects. Alzheimer's appears not only as a loss of memory but also as a physical process: "I'm getting old, I'm just getting old and forgetting." ²¹ The body thus becomes a metaphor for forgetting itself. Language, on the other hand, carries its absences within itself, condensed in silence. h from Shoalzheimer"This h, that is her, the sign of her absence and her past, hidden in a small box." ²² Objects also take on a memory-carrying function: furniture, books, objects in the grandmother's living room function as a "collection of objects that whisper who I was". ²³These things replace what language can no longer accomplish; they are material metaphors for the survival of the past in the mode of silence.

The novel's temporal structure does not follow a linear chronology, but is characterized by fragmentation and circularity. Alzheimer's intensifies the feeling of time standing still: "The most recent [memories] are the most fragile. As soon as they arrive, the events blend into a time that no longer passes. I forget everything. I forget that I forget." ²⁴ Forgetting not only erodes content but also the very form of time itself. Past and future blur, the present becomes a site of perpetual repetition and dissolution. Shoalzheimer's is thus not only a term for a legacy of forgetting but also for an altered temporality that defies narrative categorization.

The term Shoalzheimer, coined by Sigal, captures this dual dimension in a single word. It is not merely a neologism, but a poetic condensation that forces the incompatibility of the Holocaust and Alzheimer's into a paradoxical context. "On March 20, 2018, at 11:39 a.m., a word appeared in the subject line of an empty email sent from my phone: Shoalzheimer. A portmanteau word, a small box that landed in my dictionary without warning," the text reads. ²⁵ The very genesis of the word bears the character of an inspiration, a chance discovery rising from the void. Thus, the term marks the movement of the entire novel: from nothingness, from the gaps, from the grandmother's silences, a new language takes shape, one that is neither memory nor documentation, but literary invention.

Shoalzheimer points to the merging of two forms of forgetting. The Shoah produces a history that survivors often do not pass on because the trauma renders them speechless, because silence itself becomes a survival strategy. This silence shapes entire generations, as Sigal describes in retrospect: “One had to forget in order to go on living. Forgetting in a different way than the kind that befell my grandmother at the end of her life.” ²⁶ In contrast, there is the pathological forgetting caused by Alzheimer's, an involuntary erasure that is not subject to conscious will. "Her sentences form insistent, repetitive loops, ending where they begin and merging into one another. She speaks, but tells nothing." ²⁷This is how the grandmother's language deterioration is described. Shoalzheimer's is the convergence of these two forces: the active suppression of the past and the passive forgetting of the present.

The novel's poetics are characterized by fragmentation, repetition, and negativity. Sigal confesses: "The book becomes like a puzzle whose pieces no longer fit together." The text rejects all coherence; every attempt to anchor a scene in a clear past fails and is replaced by repetition. Typographically and stylistically, Sigal also employs breaks, italics, insertions, and self-commentaries. Fragmentation is not a deficiency, but rather a deliberate strategy. It reflects the disintegration of memory, the decomposition through forgetting. Shoalzheimer is thus not only the subject matter but also the structural principle of the poetics.

Ricercar

The novel unfolds in three interlocking strands: It recounts fragmentary episodes from the Shoah, which themselves remain uncertain and repeat themselves mechanically, such as the scene of the shot uncle with a Baudelaire quote: “Hans sees the contents of the bag, pulls out his pistol and shoots his uncle in the temple at close range. He collapses. ‘A flash, then the night’.” ²⁸ He also describes his grandmother's Alzheimer's disease, which erodes language and identity. And he constantly reflects on his own writing process: "I don't check anything. Writing and not checking: that's the motto when writing these pages." ²⁹ These three strands intertwine without one becoming dominant. It is precisely their superimposition that defines the form Shoalzheimer takes: a simultaneous presence of trauma, illness, and literary work.

Sigal's project is titled "Ricercare à x + 1 voix": a search for the indeterminate voices of his ancestors (x) and for his own voice as a later child (+1). The name "ricercare" refers to 16th-century Italian music: a polyphonic compositional technique that strings together loose themes, develops them successively, and interweaves them into a unity that ultimately transitions into a fugue. This search for themes and voices, this assembling of heterogeneous fragments, becomes a poetic process for Sigal: he juxtaposes the fragments of his family history, his grandmother's silence, the shards of Holocaust narratives, and his own reflections without ever fully fusing them into a coherent story.

Within the discarded manuscript "Ricercare à x + 1 voix," the narrator explicitly writes some passages in the past tense to convey the illusion of memory ("l'illusion du souvenir") when imitating his grandmother's voice. He also notes that the entire range of past tense verbs ("toute la panoplie des verbes au passé") attacks him when he tries to describe his vision of himself.

The typographical division of the text—standard type for the grandmother's voice, italics for the grandson's commentary—collapses after a short time. "Les voix se confondent," it states programmatically. As in a ricercar, the voices overlap, imitate one another, lose their individuality, until the text becomes almost illegible. This corresponds to a musical polyphony in which individual lines are no longer isolated but are only audible within the interconnectedness of the sounds.

In this process, arbitrary forgetting acquires its name: Shoah. When the grandmother in the novel is reminded that she survived only because she could speak French without an accent—a shibboleth test of life and death—language itself becomes an existential boundary. The right word, the right intonation decides between life and death; the wrong word means annihilation. This experience is a musical moment: a slight deviation, a false note that shatters the harmony and breaks the piece. The ricercar as a form thrives on precisely such deviations, embellishments, instrumental figures—but in the context of Shoalzheimer, this free play becomes deadly serious.

Particularly striking is the passage where the grandmother "steps out" of the book, when the revenge fantasies are attributed to her: "vengeance à la Kalachnikov." At this moment, she becomes "real," emerges from the musical-poetic polyphony, and becomes a figure with her own, unheard voice. Like in a motet where a dissonant line suddenly overlays all the other voices, this voice shatters the structure. It shows that literary polyphony always remains precarious: reality intrudes, it cannot be permanently captured aesthetically.

The connection to the historical ricercari deepens this understanding. In music history, they represent a precursor to the fugue: a loose sequence of different themes that are gradually reduced until a final theme dominates alone, preparing the transition to the stricter, closed form of the fugue. Sigal's novel also begins with many voices, many fragments, quotations, and commentaries. As the text progresses, this polyphony diminishes, and the concept of Shoalzheimer emerges more and more strongly as the central theme, until it ultimately dominates the entire work.

The ricercar's affinity with the fantasia, the tiento, and the toccata ultimately points to free preluding, which is not a goal but a quest: an improvised exploration that probes the tonal space before the actual piece begins. Sigal's novel corresponds to such a "prelude" movement: it explores the space of memory without ever transitioning into a closed work, a definitive narrative. It remains an unending search.

So, to put it another way: Geography of Forgetfulness It is composed as a ricercar, a polyphonic search for voices that can no longer speak. Shoalzheimer, in this sense, is the last remaining theme, the fugue that emerges from the failure of all other voices. And just as in music the ricercar never lives solely from themes, but also from ornaments, embellishments, and improvised figures, so too is Sigal's text characterized by insertions, breaks, and commentaries that play around the silence. The poetics of the ricercar make it clear why this novel is not a linear narrative, but a fragmentary, unreadable, yet profoundly musical fabric of voices that search for each other, miss their mark, and blur together in oblivion.

*

The story concludes when the author focuses his gaze on the last line of his grandmother's manuscript and reads it defiantly: "The war is over. Yes, perhaps, but I cannot forget it." ³⁰ Based on this, the author formulates the synthesis of the narrative by merging voluntary (Shoah) and involuntary (Alzheimer's) forgetting: "I have Alzheimer's and I cannot forget the Shoah." ³¹ The main narrative concludes with the author's statement: "I write, and the book falls silent." ³²

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Notes

1. ““Les verbes au passé statufient les scènes, les force dans un cadre qui sent le roman”>>>
2. “On mâche tout cela pour incorporer dès l'enfance l'histoire dramatique d'ancêtres bibliques, à laquelle se superpose l'histoire d'ancêtres réels, sans cesse réactualisée au fil des générations.”>>>
3. “On lit notre histoire, on la chante, on en discute, on l'avale.”>>>
4. "J'ai risqué ma vie (ils sont morts) ; j'aurais pu mourir (eux sont morts).">>>
5. “Je suis mort et je suis là, à this table, à vous raconter comment, réchappant à la mort, je suis passé par elle.”>>>
6. “Ma grand-mère est là, elle ne dit rien.”>>>
7. “comme la colonne de fumée d'un fire invisible”>>>
8. “Chaque fois que je couche par écrit le surgissement de la parole de ce grand-père taiseux (et dans les profondeurs le sousgissement du non-dit), je me prends les pieds dans les filets de la fiction.”>>>
9. “On ne fictionne pas avec les camps et l'extermination.”>>>
10. "Le doute m'assaille dès que je couche l'histoire familiale sur le papier. Je doute de pouvoir écrire quoi que ce soit à ce sujet.">>>
11. "It is always too written, words freeze bodies and attitudes.">>>
12. “Mais ça ne fonctionne toujours pas, la fiction grésille toujours et encore, pas moyen de s'en dégager.”>>>
13. "Ce repas de famille devient un fantasme, nourri des rêves et des fantasmes d'autres. J'ai vécu this scène, mais cette scène, une fois écrite, est invivable. Elle est trop écrite pour être vécue. Elle ouvre un livre que je veux écrire et le livre Ne veut pas venir. Il reste bloqué quelque part entre le ventre et la gorge.”>>>
14. “I've heard everything in the language of my mother, which is the language of my own language.”>>>
15. “Ce qu'elle ne m'a jamais dit ne sera pas dit dans le livre.”>>>
16. “Tu sais, en Pologne, nous étions cent cinquante, cent quarante-sept sont morts.”>>>
17. "Eux racontent un peu leur enfance, leur adolescence, leur réussite. Elles, rien. Comme si elles n'avaient pas eu de vie.">>>
18. “Ma grand-mère est là, elle ne dit rien.”>>>
19. “J'aurais aimé pouvoir mourir et faire mourir avec moi… empporter ces criminels dans le tourbillon d'une vengeance à la Kalachnikov.”>>>
20. “Je force l'impensable dans sa bouche pour atténuer ma tristesse.”>>>
21. “Je vieillis, je ne fais plus que vieillir et oublier.”>>>
22. "Ce h, this is the sign of his absence and his passing glissé in a small boîte.”>>>
23. “accumulation d'objets qui murmurent qui j'ai été”>>>
24. "Les plus récents [souvenirs] sont les plus fragiles. Sitôt arrivés, les événements se mêlent en un temps qui ne passe plus. J'oublie tout. J'oublie que j'oublie.">>>
25. "On March 20, 2018, at 11:39 a.m., we arrived in the title of an e-mail without content, envoyé de mon téléphone: Shoalzheimer. A mot-valise, a small boîte atterrie sans prévenir dans mon dictionnaire.">>>
26. "Il a fallu oublier pour pouvoir continuer à vivre. Oublier d'un oubli d'un other type que celui qui atteint ma grand-mère à la fin de sa vie.">>>
27. "Ses phrases dessinent des boucles entêtantes et répétitives, finissent là où elles commencent et se fondent les unes dans les les other. Elle parle mais ne raconte rien">>>
28. "Hans voit le content du sac, sort son pistol et tire à bout portant sur la tempe de son oncle. Il s'effondre. 'Un éclair, puis la nuit'".>>>
29. "Je ne verifie rien. Écrire et ne pas verifier: voilà ce qui préside à l'écriture de ces pages.">>>
30. "La guerre est finie. Oui, peut-être, mais moi, je ne peux pas l'oublier.">>>
31. J'ai Alzheimer et je ne peux pas oublier Shoah.>>>
32. “J'écris et le livre se tait.”>>>