A Memory of War
by Frederick Busch

List Price: $14.95
Pages: 368
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0345460510
Publisher: Ballantine

Psychologist Alexander Lescziak savors a life of quiet sophistication on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, when a new patient declares he is the doctor’s half-brother, the product of a union between Lescziak’s Jewish mother and a German prisoner-of-war. Suddenly Lescziak finds his world closing in on him, as events acquire new significance: his failed marriage, his wife’s possible affair with his best friend, and the disappearance of his young lover, who also happens to be his suicidal patient. In search of answers, Lescziak delves into the recesses of his own mind, when the past threatens to press in inexorably upon the present.

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1. For all the characters’ histories presented, we are only in Alex’s consciousness throughout the novel. From what point in time is Alex remembering all these events? What is the significance of that? What is the purpose of Busch having one character create the experience of memory for the other characters?

2. Busch uses repetition and variation of a certain set of words— i.e., chatter, pant, verge, panic, tingle. What is the effect of this repetition? Why does it become important?

3. Alex’s father’s name is Januscz; Nella’s former boyfriend works (Alex thinks) for Janus, the investment firm; many characters have names that feature double consonants: Nell; Teddy; Otto; William, etc. What do you make of all the mirroring? Can you find other mirror effects in the plot itself?

4. Time travel is mentioned several times. Why? How does the impossibility of real time travel comment on the process of memory? What about the mention of Alice in Wonderland?

5. Continuing the mirror idea: How do each of the major characters embody differing aspects of Alex’s self? Can we trust these portraits of characters he paints as anything other than those aspects? Can you find points in the novel where Alex states plainly that this is what they are?

6. Three main occupations are pursued by those in Alex’s present: the arts, the law, and psychoanalysis. If “All your clues are from Freud and my wife…” what are we to make of Busch’s use of these three? What of the women—Liz, Detective Rhys, Nella— who have the starring role (and Alex’s desire) in each?

7. In their final meeting before Januscz becomes aware of Sylvia’s infidelity, Alex, who is conjecturing this entire scene, has Otto and Sylvia discuss the conjecture of memory just so the loved one might be remembered. This is one of the scenes in which Busch brings two major forces of the novel—talk and love—together, making them nearly one and the same. In what other scenes does this equating occur? How do the nature of love and talk change for Alex over the course of the novel?

8. During the meeting with Grensen, Busch alternates between repeated uses of the color white and invocations of the pristine calm of Nella’s father’s house with Otto’s endurance in the dark horror and filth of the death camp. As these are taking place in Alex’s mind simultaneously, what is the implication of this back and forth? How does Alex’s imagining of Sylvia’s imagining Otto’s experience echo what Alex has told us of his time as a very young child in Barrow? At what point does the “white” of Nella’s childhood become sinister? What is the meaning of “storming in heaven?”

9. The novel ends as it begins, with a memory of his father, but a much different memory. Discuss how that memory has altered. How did the meeting with Nella’s father influence the change? What does Alex gain in return for his re-remembering?

10. Is it important, ultimately, whether or not William Kessler is actually Alex’s brother? Why did Kessler’s arrival precipitate Alex’s crisis and generate this elaborate effort of personal revision? 11.The William Carlos Williams poem that Alex remembers stealing, as a child is evocative for several reasons. Note the isolated word in each stanza; note also Alex explaining the meaning as being agricultural. How does this help render the memory as organic and appropriate to the narrative flow of his memory in general?

12.Also in regard to the poem: Williams speaks of the precise choice of detail that will turn an idea of an image into a concrete experience for the reader. Why is this poem essential to understanding how Alex is telling us his ideas about his life, his past? What is Busch saying about exactly how we make our memories real for ourselves?

13. The element of choice in memory notwithstanding, the novel faces the hard fact of a horrific set of historical events. Given what Alex tells us and how Busch gets it told, what do you think is the measure by which we can trust memory? What is the difference between memory and history?

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"Powerful . . . Compelling . . . Hypnotic . . . A profound exploration of a man at war with himself."

—The Boston Sunday Globe

"Exquisite prose, at once delicate and muscular. This deeply felt novel adroitly juxtaposes the intellectual, the emotional, and the sensual. Probing questions of who we are merge seamlessly with the tumult of emotional upheaval and the sensation of flesh caressing flesh."

—Chicago Tribune

"Busch examines many facets of memory, guilt, love, forgiveness, denial, holding on, and letting go. In this way, he takes a narrowly focused narrative—one man's worries, real and imaginary—and transforms it into a peek into the emotional legacy of the twentieth century."

—Richmond Times-Dispatch

"Irresistible . . . A novel of startling psychological intensity that explores the rewriting of history, or the imagining of it. . . . It's to Busch's credit that he's able to turn his kaleidoscope with such graceful, tantalizing precision; as Alex's search for morsels of truth turns obsessive, Busch's snapshots become addictive."

—Salon.com

"Beautiful, harrowing . . . In Busch's skilled hands, past and present merge to become a sublimely haunting yet gorgeously uplifting account of one man's need to bridge the great gulf dividing heart and mind, body and soul."

—Elle

"SOME OF THE STRONGEST WRITING OF BUSCH'S RICH CAREER."

—Book magazine

"Busch is a mature, elegant writer who is particularly good at exposing the vulnerabilities of male-female relationships. . . . He's also a master of narrative understatement. . . . [He] has an extraordinary ability to observe and describe the subtext of what goes on between friends, colleagues, and couples. He understands the way the human mind dips, dives, and makes astonishing associations, while on the outside people behave in familiar, even predictable ways."

—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"A Memory of War draws its power from its characters as the protagonist tries to solve the puzzle of who they really are and the reader in turn tries to puzzle him out as well. . . . It delivers for its readers a vividly imagined wartime story, in language alternately subtle and striking, romantic and real, and maps out a psychological landscape that is devastated in visible and invisible ways by a war fought almost half a century before."

—Richmond Times-Dispatch

"Frederick Busch is, surely, America's most courageous and most focused of writers. Intelligent, compassionate, and unflinchingly adult, his new novel, A Memory of War, is an outstanding audit of the emotional legacies that haunt and disfigure contemporary American life. Rarely has a writer put such muscular, rigorous prose to such tender use."

—JIM CRACE

"Frederick Busch moves deftly past the smoke and mirrors of wartime memory and troubled peacetime reconstructions to reveal a heartbreaking spiral of love and betrayal in two generations, one European, the other American. The writing here is beautiful, sometimes wickedly funny. Vivid as the characters of this novel are, it is history itself that is the captivating protagonist."

—PATRICIA HAMPL

"A MEMORY OF WAR DREW ME ON FROM PAGE ONE."

—San Diego Reader

"I am, once again, delighted and amazed and, frankly, in awe of what Frederick Busch can do with the novel as an art form. A Memory of War is a brilliant and complex meditation. . . . It's too easy to say 'memory' or 'imagination' or 'guilt' or 'love.' It's about all those things, but it's about much more. Perhaps the unnameable essence of existence. And, not incidentally, the novel is also an intensely compelling story. A Memory of War is a transcendently great book."

—ROBERT OLEN BUTLER

"Masterful . . . The legacies of betrayal, illicit love, guilt, and loss haunt the protagonist of Busch's powerful new novel, a meditation on the long reach of history, and its aftermath of alienated souls. . . . [Busch] explores the human condition with precision and compassion."

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Busch, a versatile writer of consummate skill, dramatizes the unexpected legacies of war and complex questions of power and duty. . . . [His] ravishing, near-thriller novel, one that should earn him the larger readership he so richly deserves, places the most private of emotions within the context of a cruel and chaotic world, and reveals the oceanic depths of our capacity and penchant for both pain and pleasure."

—Booklist (boxed and starred review)

"Unforgettable . . . Powerfully developed . . . In a seamless fusion of scene, dialogue, and reminiscence, Busch draws us into [a] turbulent psyche."

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"For all who care to linger, the pleasures of the written word are on ample display in Frederick Busch's new novel. . . . The reward comes [from] prose that shimmers and a sensibility that respects the difficulty of devising a happy, sustainable life—in or out of wartime."

—BookPage

"[A] RICH STORY ABOUT THE STORIES WE TELL IN SELF-DEFENSE AND SELF-ASSAULT."

—Entertainment Weekly