[Now Or Never; 2014]
Enter the mind of Bruno Leblon, a neurotic professor on holiday from his semester of teaching. His days are spent researching his family history. He pours over hand-scrawled notes taped to family photos in the Public Library archive. Soon, he notices that a man — who he comes to refer to as “X” — is writing his own family history. Sitting across from him at the library, and re-encountering him on the street, Bruno is certain that the man is impersonating him.
Over the course of Temenuga Trifonova’s debut novel Rewrite, the reader follows Bruno’s day-to-day life, which is woven with his past and the reality of other characters. His story is choreographed through written accounts he discovers on the back of the archival photos and his paranoid reflections on the character X, whose identity is perpetually conflated with Bruno’s. X might be Bruno in another era, or at a different age. Or perhaps Bruno and X are ghosts or spiritual entities. As characters interact in the novel, you are never certain whose version of reality is accurate. Despite Bruno’s conversations with others, the events in the novel interfere, proposing multiple versions of reality at once. This uncertainty regarding the status of reality is exacerbated by the fact that Bruno oscillates amongst multiple levels of consciousness, hallucination, and dream state. By playing with this ambiguity, Trifonova questions our understanding of the interrelation of reality, time, memory, and history, forcing the reader to reassess the opinions and institutions that validate the knowledge we have both of ourselves and of others.
Trifonova dismantles Bruno’s identity from the start, by depriving him of photographic evidence of his identity. When a letter in his mailbox requires two recent photographs to renew his identity card, he goes to the photographer’s, sits in front of a camera and is repeatedly asked to inch closer to the camera. After fiddling with the settings, the photographer eventually admits that the camera does not register his presence. He says, “There are some slight, almost imperceptible, variations in the amount of light that gets reflected off of you. When I asked you to move closer the camera did record something like a dark stain right in the place where you should have been. Unfortunately, when I asked you to move even closer, the stain vanishes. It’s as if you are not present, except for a few fractions of a second perhaps.” Bruno believed that the body itself could not be fictionalized, as it is a lucid structure, although he understood that the brain could overexpose itself and reveal itself in the body. Trifonova robs Bruno of the perpetual visibility to which the camera should be condemning him, and in doing so draws the reader’s attention to the ways in which we use representation in an attempt to fix in place a reality that exceeds our grasp, as she will do again and again over the course of Rewrite. Trifonova questions what claims we make upon ourselves and others, and how we respond to these claims when they disagree. She draws our attention to this seemingly innate mode of thought production and circulation to ask who validates identities over time.
Beyond examining how individuals construct their own identities, Trifonova addresses how time and history sediment knowledge. On a trip to the Natural History Museum, Bruno immediately recognizes a 19th-century sitting room to be identical to a photo he had seen at the library. To his astonishment, he notices X in this sitting room. Like photos, the room is a mise en scène upon which X can project to construct his own life history. As X inserts himself into the room, he activates the otherwise passive subjectivity and mechanized, distanced absorption typical of a spectator’s engagement with museum relics. Elderly museum patrons find X standing by and looking out the window in the room, only there is nothing to look at, just the brick wall of the room. They notice his body’s imprint on the settee. When this attachment and intimacy towards the room is laid out in X’s relation to the museum, we can’t help but feel it is abnormal, excessive, further underlining our adherence to it’s opposite: ingrained behavior. It is this reaction Trifonova solicits. Knowledge is constructed by coordinating chronological excerpts. Relics alone may not be able to excrete the narratives within the sumptuousness of being or culture. The portrait of loss, of ceded objects that knowledge inevitably negates, is left untold. Trifonova suggests connecting to such histories is still possible, the sense-making of such histories is manifest, through our subjective relation and experience to them. Eventually, X no longer needs contact with the objects to feel like they belong to him, because the room has “opened itself to him.” This is the state of proximity, of hypersensitive awareness to one’s space in time, that Trifonova proposes we embrace the world with.
Objects in the book, like Bruno’s dead mother’s hairbrush, haunt us sporadically, piling in a slew of unresolved bits in a heap. The reader sews them together, in a microcosm, in dialogue with the large-scale connective nature of structures that mediate and bifurcate knowledge. Trifonova requests we rearrange. The end of the book offers no resolve, Bruno’s imposter sits before him telling his childhood memories in his parent’s abandoned home that he grew up in. As she pulls the rug out from under us, Trifonova poses the biting problematic of who authors historical and psychological knowledge, choreographing conflating histories, whose normative schemas are inadequate. By structurally leaving open the protagonist’s life, she draws parallels to how we interpret our own reality by fusing the bits we resonate with and want to stand out, keeping intact the fragmentary and poetic nature of thought. Reality suffers disproportionate losses within frames to which it is never entirely reducible. After all, perception is our “absolute proximity” to things and at the same time, our “irremediable distance” from them.1
1. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and The Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 8.
Maia Nichols is a California born artist and writer currently living and working in Berlin. Her work can be found at maianichols.com.
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