{"id":2043,"date":"2012-11-27T11:52:11","date_gmt":"2012-11-27T10:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?page_id=2043"},"modified":"2016-04-28T12:28:20","modified_gmt":"2016-04-28T11:28:20","slug":"michael-jacobs-the-robber-of-memories","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?page_id=2043","title":{"rendered":"Michael Jacobs, The Robber Of Memories"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"michael-jacobs\"
Michael Jacobs not long before his death; this was his last book<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Michael Jacobs, The Robber Of Memories, <\/em>Granta (\u00a316.99)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It is impossible to write a book about Colombia, particularly the Magdalena river which runs to its heart, without invoking the presiding spirit of Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez.\u00a0 It is the river that M\u00e1rquez uses at the end of Love In The Time Of Cholera <\/em>for what Michael Jacobs describes as \u2018a meditation on the persistence of love over the years\u2019, as the elderly protagonists make one final journey along its length;\u00a0 it is the river so central to Colombian identity that elsewhere M\u00e1rquez titled an essay \u2018The Magdalena: The River Of Our Life\u2019;\u00a0 and it is the river that M\u00e1rquez himself travelled down as a 15-year-old on one of the last paddle steamers, an experience that left an indelible impression on him.<\/p>\n

By good fortune, Jacobs chances on the now frail and elderly M\u00e1rquez in Cartagena before beginning his book and journey. \u2018Gabo\u2019, as the Colombians nickname him, has been suffering from memory loss for some time, and rarely returns to Colombia, but movingly asserts that he \u2018remembers everything about the river, absolutely everything:\u00a0 the caimans, the manatees…\u2019<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

In following his famous predecessor up the Magdalena, Jacobs is not travelling light.\u00a0 The glamorous paddle steamers have long gone and he has a cumbersome journey on a tugboat pushing several laden barges. At times, they crawl to walking speed to negotiate shifting sandbanks that defeat all sonar instruments; a sailor must call the mark by prodding the water ahead of them with a pole, like the early Spanish explorers who first came this way. While far improved from the dark days of last century\u2019s La Violencia<\/em>, much of the interior of Colombia is still a security risk and armed soldiers travel on board.\u00a0 Towards the river\u2019s source, FARC guerrillas appear with unsettling politeness and ask him if he is yet frightened; the inference is that if not, he certainly should be. \u00a0But most of all it is his own responsibilities to an ill mother back in England that weigh heavily: she too has a form of Alzheimer’s.\u00a0 His mobile phone, which seems to work when all other technology on the boat fails, brings news of her confusion and distress that haunt him with both guilt and at times candid irritation.<\/p>\n

While a concern with memory and forgetting are central to this fine book, and his mood, as Jacobs put it, is often one of melancholy and foreboding, it is by no means a gloomy read.\u00a0 A GP has given him \u2018the only possible advice for someone witnessing the slow disappearance of a mind:\u00a0 to enjoy one’s own life with added intensity\u2019, and Jacobs\u2019 descriptions of the river are luminous: white cattle egrets flashing across the emerald-green witch ceibas, and the source at his journey\u2019s end like \u2018a silvery offering in an eerily monochromatic world\u2019.<\/p>\n

There are also absences: the caimans and manatees M\u00e1rquez remembered once crowding its banks have long since disappeared, victims of pesticide \u00a0and of the neglect shown by Bogot\u00e1 politicians more concerned with earning money from the toll roads in which they have commercial interests.<\/p>\n

The gentle susurro<\/em> of the river has a narcoleptic effect on the passengers as they travel upstream, past hamlets so small they no longer bother to learn their names.\u00a0 This was the lost world M\u00e1rquez described in One Hundred Years Of Solitude<\/em>, where he fantasised that you might chance on a stranded Spanish galleon between Macondo and the sea, a gold-encrusted apparition that would become one of the defining images of magical realism.<\/p>\n

Many distinguished \u00a0Anglophone writers have tried to follow Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez down the tightrope of magic realist writing and tumbled clumsily into the netting.\u00a0 Jacobs avoids the obvious traps, and his gentle, discursive style is well suited to eliciting confidences from the fellow passengers and crew.\u00a0 This is not one of those books about landscape that leaves out the people.<\/p>\n

His previous outing, Andes<\/em>, was an ambitious undertaking, many times the length of this new one and with thousands more miles to cover.\u00a0 The Robber Of Memories<\/em> – the apposite title comes from a figure in Colombian folk legend – covers less ground but perhaps achieves more.\u00a0 Subtle and precise, it may well be Jacobs\u2019 finest work after a lifetime of studying the Hispanic world. This is travel writing at its best, with the memories a country creates about itself\u00a0 weaving with those of the author for a journey that pulses with an elegiac, penumbral light.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A version of this review was first published in\u00a0The Independent<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Jacobs, The Robber Of Memories, Granta (\u00a316.99)   It is impossible to write a book about Colombia, particularly the Magdalena river which runs to its heart, without invoking the presiding spirit of Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez.\u00a0 It is the river that M\u00e1rquez uses at the end of Love In The Time Of Cholera for what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":616,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"page-without-sidebar.php","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2043","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2043"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2043"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2928,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2043\/revisions\/2928"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}