Aurelia, Aurélia: A Memoir

An eerily dreamlike memoir, and the first work of nonfiction by one of our most inventive novelists.Aurelia, Aurélia begins on a boat. The author, sixteen years old, is traveling to Europe at an age when one can "try on personae like dresses." She has the confidence of a teenager cultivating her earliest obsessions-Woolf, Durrell, Bergman-sure of her maturity, sure of the life that awaits her. Soon she finds herself in a Greece far drearier than the Greece of fantasy, "climbing up and down the steep paths every morning with the real old women, looking for kindling."Kathryn Davis's hypnotic new book is a meditation on the way imagination shapes life, and how life, as it moves forward, shapes imagination. At its center is the death of her husband, Eric. The book unfolds as a study of their marriage, its deep joys and stinging frustrations; it is also a book about time, the inexorable events that determine beginnings and endings. The preoccupations that mark Davis's fiction are recognizable here-fateful voyages, an intense sense of place, the unexpected union of the magical and the real-but the vehicle itself is utterly new.Aurelia, Aurélia explodes the conventional bounds of memoir. It is an astonishing accomplishment.