The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

By Michael Zapata

“When there are refugees there are disseminated memories, tendrils of memories like octopus ink, orphaned memories, fragments of memories like pages of a half-burned book. All of those memories are still living.”

For pondering unknowns and deep questions, this is your book. It’s about a lost story. And then it’s about lots of lost stories. And in the same way it’s about stories that are never lost, always present, but in forms we can’t easily see. At one point the protagonist, Maxwell, remembers his mother telling him “literature was a memory of a memory of a memory.”

This is not your mainstream book club read. My interest was piqued when I heard it was about a story within a story. A manuscript, thought to be destroyed at the hands of its author as she is dying, turns up through a labyrinthine set of relationships and sets the reader on a questioning journey. It’s a mystery without a resolution, as is life. In these layered stories, Zapata invites us, along with his characters, to consider what happens to our stories after we are dead. The protagonist’s manuscript, having mysteriously survived and traveled over time offers an opportunity to play with questions, such as what happens to our memories? What happens to our stories? Where do our stories live? Who carries our stories? And what happens when they are returned to us, or when we track them down?

Zapata brings theoretical physics, parallel universes and the rock solid reality of Hurricane Katrina to this wandering imagining of the power of stories and memories. We are invited to ask what we hold, and what we are willing to share, and how the waves of meaning ripple through time, originating and perpetuating with our choices.