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A review by jackwwang
The Robber of Memories: A River Journey Through Colombia by Michael Jacobs
5.0
I wish I could write as beautifully as this about my travels.
Jacobs works some magic with his prose as he weaves his travel down the Magdalena river seamlessly with the theme of memory and oblivion. Among it's many monikers, it's river is apparently known by some as the robber of memories. In the first chapter my appetite was whetted after a scene in which Jacobs meets an aged Garcia Marquez in Cartagena, marked by Alzheimers, but snapping back to lucidity to exclaim his deep affection and impressions of the river of his life and dreams.
As Jacobs makes his haphazard journey south, deeper and deeper into Colombia, further and further into danger, higher in elevation, closer to the source, the sense of shrouding fog parallels the decline of his mother's condition as her own clinical forgetfulness worsens across the world in England. The journey is rendered deeply personal for the author. As he witnesses the complicated forms memory and oblivion takes in Colombia, so too is he reminded the same sides of the coin in his personal and family history.
Along the river he meets victims and families thereof of the past, and sometimes not-so-past fraught Colombian history of violence. Deeper into the river, he languidly wanders through forgotten towns that inspired similar locations in Garcia Marquez' 100 years (the most memorable was Mompox, a village that seems to hang on the insistence of its residents' stake in a more glorious past).
At last in the end we reach the source, a land of permanent mist that seems to exist at the seam between our world and the void. Jacobs masterfully crescendos his story toward this point, and after certain dangers his completion of the journey reaches an inflection point and a internal protean choice between remembering and forgetting, between Mnemosyne and the water of Lethe. Which did he choose? I don't remember; moreover does that matter? The fact that I found this not at all overwrought I think is enormous testament to the author's abilities.
Jacobs works some magic with his prose as he weaves his travel down the Magdalena river seamlessly with the theme of memory and oblivion. Among it's many monikers, it's river is apparently known by some as the robber of memories. In the first chapter my appetite was whetted after a scene in which Jacobs meets an aged Garcia Marquez in Cartagena, marked by Alzheimers, but snapping back to lucidity to exclaim his deep affection and impressions of the river of his life and dreams.
As Jacobs makes his haphazard journey south, deeper and deeper into Colombia, further and further into danger, higher in elevation, closer to the source, the sense of shrouding fog parallels the decline of his mother's condition as her own clinical forgetfulness worsens across the world in England. The journey is rendered deeply personal for the author. As he witnesses the complicated forms memory and oblivion takes in Colombia, so too is he reminded the same sides of the coin in his personal and family history.
Along the river he meets victims and families thereof of the past, and sometimes not-so-past fraught Colombian history of violence. Deeper into the river, he languidly wanders through forgotten towns that inspired similar locations in Garcia Marquez' 100 years (the most memorable was Mompox, a village that seems to hang on the insistence of its residents' stake in a more glorious past).
At last in the end we reach the source, a land of permanent mist that seems to exist at the seam between our world and the void. Jacobs masterfully crescendos his story toward this point, and after certain dangers his completion of the journey reaches an inflection point and a internal protean choice between remembering and forgetting, between Mnemosyne and the water of Lethe. Which did he choose? I don't remember; moreover does that matter? The fact that I found this not at all overwrought I think is enormous testament to the author's abilities.