The Memory of the Air by Belgian writer Caroline Lamarche, translated from the French by Katherine Gregor, is a novella about relationships, trauma, and the abuse of power. In this novella, presented as a monologue, an anonymous female narrator comes to terms with sexual trauma and an abusive relationship, the details of which slowly unfold as the story progresses. 

The Memory of the Air begins with a dream of a dead woman in a ravine. The dream hints at repressed trauma. The narrator continues to visit the dream woman, wanting to unravel her mystery. “I woke up determined to continue my conversation with the dead woman. When had she died? Why? Who had stopped her in mid-flight at an age when women are at their most beautiful?” 

Visiting the dream woman requires the narrator to revisit her past and her relationship with her former lover, a man she calls Manfore. His name is a fabrication, a contraction of “man” plus “before.” It is also a clever choice by the translator; the man’s nickname in the original French is Davant, a variation on d’avant which means before in French. 

The novella is largely about what happens in this relationship between two people who are the only witnesses to it, apart from the air itself. Manipulative and chronically depressed, Manfore distorts the truth, gaslights the narrator, and finally makes her responsible for whether or not he kills himself. The narrator feels compelled to watch over him, to become like the air he breathes—constantly around him, but also weighed down by his threats. As the narrator tells us, “The memory of the air stores all our gestures, all our words, even the gestures and words we end up abandoning.”

The narrator finds the courage to leave Manfore after a quarrel during which Manfore punches her in the arm and stomach. The next day, instead of apologizing, Manfore tells the narrator that she provoked him, that her unresolved trauma meant that she found violence everywhere, that she was violent. 

  At the core of this novella is a series of stunning images related to seeing and witnessing. The narrator describes a pair of mirrors in the bedroom she shares with Manfore. Strangely hung and too small to reflect what happens in that room, the mirrors are, in the narrator’s words, “a pair of blind eyes. Eyes that couldn’t see what I was seeing. Something no one saw, no one knew, something I haven’t told anyone. Or if I have, if I happened to say it in a moment of weakness, something no one believed.” Like the air that remembers but cannot speak, these strangely non-reflecting mirrors are present but cannot see what happens in the room. Whatever the couple does—reading, making love, arguing—it is always just the two of them. 

In another powerful sequence, the narrator remembers watching spiders as a small child.  She was fascinated by the spider in its web, “a work of art as well as a trap.” She notes that the “feeling of being in the center, like the spider, is the same as when you’re telling a story.”  A storyteller herself, the narrator identifies with the beauty, art, and strength of the spider. But this empowering recollection is undermined when, as an adult, she admires a different spider with Manfore. 

The narrator tells Manfore the spider is a diadem spider, “the most beautiful of spiders.” Manfore replies that other spiders are beautiful too, hinting that he has other women in his life. He then demonstrates that the spider will eat the ash of his cigarette. He drops ash on the web, wearing away at it. “I thought I could hear a tiny sizzle, as all-consuming as my anxiety,” the narrator reports. Like a spider, Manfore is a predator who has her trapped in his web, but the narrator is also like the spider, a beautiful woman (one of many, perhaps) who has spun a web and who sits at the center of her story. Looking back at that time, the narrator realizes that she has fed on Manfore’s cruel games, as the spider fed on his cigarette’s ashes. 

Air, mirrors, and spiders make for ineffective witnesses. When a woman such as the narrator turns to the police or to doctors for help, she may not be believed.  And yet her story remains. In a 2014 interview with Espace Livres, Lamarche explained: “The air preserves the memory of all the stories that humans tell themselves since the dawn of time” (translation mine). Like the air itself,  this novella, though fictional, bears witness to the traumatic moments of women’s lives.

These powerful images—air, mirrors, spiders—make this novel a joy to read, inviting readers to tease out the many layers of meaning. The plot itself is relatively simple, although disturbing, involved as it is in probing the narrator’s traumatic history. The translation by Katherine Gregor does justice to the lyricism of the original French. This is a book to be savored, as the reader visits the woman in the ravine in tandem with the narrator and discovers the truth of her experiences.

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Born in 1955 in Liège, Caroline Lamarche is the author of six novels as well as poetry, short fiction, and works for radio. She lives outside Brussels.

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Katharine Gregor translates from French and Italian. She is currently based in Norwich.

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Shara Kronmal is a physician, writer and translator from French to English. She is an editorial assistant at CRAFT Literary Journal. Her essays have appeared in Please See Me and The Journal of the American Medical Association. She lives in Chicago.