Borrowed Memories
“Borrowed Memories” by Mark Foss is very much a story about ‘the spaces between words,’ the actions and orientations of a family and a Jewish filmmaker who spiral around each other, pulling each other close and pushing each other away. There is Ivan Pyefinch, he is translating Mia Hakim’s written testimony of her trip to Tunisia in search of her childhood roots and to locate a family story of exile. Between records of Ivan and Mia’s email correspondences, “Borrowed Memories” centres around Ivan taking care of his aging parents. Ivan’s father, Horace, is a WWII veteran having served as a pilot. His focus and behaviour orient around self-asserted preparations for a Remembrance Day parade. Horace is rough around the edges and self-absorbed. Horace takes up space. His wife, Aida, a gentle woman suffering from Alzheimer’s exists quietly and hectically within the folds of Horace’s hobby projects and temperament. Ivan has lived within the crosshairs of his father’s often callous and self-centred actions and a timid mother who learned to become small and malleable early. Mark Foss does an excellent job to crack open moments of grace amongst these characters, but much of what the reader can appreciate from “Borrowed Memories” is what is left unspoken.
“Borrowed Memories” is Mark Foss’s third novel and is published with 8th House Publishing. Foss has grown up in Ottawa and has resided in Montreal since 2012. He holds two degrees from Carleton University: Bachelor of Journalism and Bachelor of Art in Film Studies. He has been published with The New Quarterly, Prism International, sub-Terrain, untethered, Existere, and This Will Only Take a Minute: 100 Canadian Flashes. He has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize for non-fiction. Lastly, Foss has also worked in broadcast media hosting a radio program, When the Lights Go Down and 12 podcasts for Progzilla Radio on music, specifically, progressive rock.
Foss delicately threads in elements of his life and living alongside aging parents that brings authenticity and depth to his characters that I find makes this novel more eloquent and heart-wrenching at times. Further, readers can connect and find reprieve in this work in relating to what life is like while we help care for aging parents ourselves. Foss articulates in an author interview, “I would say the main plot lines, including the details you mention, closely mirror my own life, but only up to a point. Ivan’s parents are very much based on my own.” Particularly, Foss draws from his own mother’s experience with craft and hobby and how the once solid phases of creative expression are curtailed by the cognitive deterioration of aging. His mother was interested in decoupage. He explains, “in my childhood, she would make these gorgeous jewel boxes with images of butterflies and flowers. Towards the end of her life, she would spend hours painstakingly cutting out images but could never get to the next stage of pasting, sanding and varnishing.” We see this similar behaviour with Aida in that she spends the quiet hours of her days cutting out paper butterflies that do not come to fruition in a completed project. Perhaps the behaviour is a metaphor of her place in the family. Memory loss, mental decline and physical barrier are elements that Foss weaves into the narrative. I also located a similar scope of aging that is not apparent to the characters or possibly the reader until nearing the end of the novel with Horace as well. He appears stubborn and almost resilient in the charisma and excess of energy he throws into his own household projects that either end chaotically, throw in wrenches of mistakes the old man finds hard to process that discretely mirror his mental deterioration that is in fact running parallel with his wife’s own falling out. This parallel character arc was unexpected and functioned to sharpen the acknowledgement and realization for the reader of the emotional turmoil that the family endure while facing life’s actuality of mortal timelines.
The email correspondences between Ivan and Mia were elements of dialogue that drew me in and pieces I looked forward to that threaded in an eloquent literary voice while providing contextualization of what the characters were going through. I liked the play on language and the relationship both forge throughout these email exchanges. A theme emerged of what is lost in translation in meaning, but also looking outward with the physical movements of the characters, I could identify what was lost in translation between these characters too. One exchange stuck with me: “Something is missing in the last translation, as if I write with my heart and you translate with your head. I like my sentences to be waves that go on (and on), because they must be like my films, too much to contain in one breath, lava rolling from a volcanic eruption that takes everything in its path. I sense you removing all the rough edges and imperfections, which, to me, are the essence of how I approach cinema, the forces that bring it to life. My sentences need to breathe more, they are shaped to death. I'm sorry but it reads like an instruction manual.” I pictured with this analogy of the brevity of sentences and the want for our spirit to flow freely like waves, we cannot contain ourselves perfectly, even within the rules forced down on us from our own lives.
Mia is the one too, within these email segments who explicitly reveals the mechanisms of what she has observed of Ivan’s parents and their current living situation. “I think of this strange family I recently met, an old man obsessed with his own past, desperate to find meaning in it, to not forget, carrying his vanity and fear in equal measure, the weight of it pulling his shoulders forward…[t]he old woman, her memory almost gone, yet still sharp, seeing places the rest of us cannot. Her mind wrestles with the desire to forget, the need to remember. So eager to please and not bother, a silent woman all her life who is finding her voice and has no one to listen. And their son, because how else could I describe him? A man, yes, but a son first. So dedicated to his parents like a small boy who wants to please them….” She is the one who articulates that Horace is the one who takes up space, Aida is carefully suffering within the rules of the family who are crafting the flow of her being into shorter, digestible sentences. Ivan is a devoted son, despite the reader knowing what he really feels, the breadth of these character arcs climb to climax, something’s got to give.
And the plot does start to give, unravelling quickly that will keep the reader turning pages. I won’t give anything away, but the parallel between Mia’s positioning within Tunisia during the events of the Arab Spring and the events for Ivan with his parents creates an interesting dynamic. The domestic and globally charged political tensions establish an interesting foil that ends the novel. I wanted more, to journey alongside Ivan, yet again in the spaces between words, with those flowing spirit-filled sentences, between the movements amongst characters that words can’t convey.
Thank you to Mark Foss, 8th House Publishing and River Street Writing for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!
Sources
https://www.riverstreetwriting.com/blog/2024/5/3/power-q-amp-a-with-mark-foss
