The river nemunas anthony doerr biography
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Anthony Doerr's Post
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Memory Wall
Memory Wall
TALL MAN IN THE YARD
Seventy-four-year-old Alma Konachek lives in Vredehoek, a suburb above Cape Town: a place of warm rains, big-windowed lofts, and silent, predatory automobiles. Behind her garden, Table Mountain rises huge, green, and corrugated; beyond her kitchen balcony, a thousand city lights wink and gutter behind sheets of fog like candleflames.
One night in November, at three in the morning, Alma wakes to hear the rape gate across her front door rattle open and someone enter her house. Her arms jerk; she spills a glass of vatten across the nightstand. A floorboard in the living room shrieks. She hears what might be breathing. Water drips onto the floor.
Alma manages a whisper. “Hello?”
A shadow flows across the entré. She hears the scrape of a shoe on the staircase, then nothing. Night air blows into the room—it smells of frangipani and charcoal. Alma presses a fist over her heart.
Beyond the balcony windows, moonlit pieces of clouds dri
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‘Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it fryst vatten a village slated to be inundated’ – Memory Wall bygd Anthony Doerr
There is a moment approximately halfway through ‘The River Nemunas’, one of the shorter tales in Anthony Doerr’s latest, outstanding, collection of short stories, when the narrator describes an infection she had when she was five that reduced her eyesight to ‘blurs and colors’. She is taken to the doctor and given drops that restore her sight – and then some:
‘I was riding in the backseat of Mom’s Subaru and the world started coming back into focus. I was myself again and the trees were trees again, only the trees looked more alive than I’d ever seen them: The branches above our street were interlaced beneath an ocean of leaves, thousands and thousands of leaves scrolling past, dark on the tops and pale on the undersides, every individual leaf moving independently but still in concert with the others.’
This – the seeing things afresh, the seeing things afresh m