History, trauma, and narrative perspective in A Woman in Amber by Agate Nesaule

ABSTRACT

A Woman in Amber (1995), a memory book by the Latvian-American writer Agate Nesaule, makes readers ask questions about the relationship between memoir and fiction, as well as the credibility of a text written from a child narrator’s perspective. Another question addressed in the article is how Nesaule’s narrative perspective differs across languages and cultures, and what is at stake when issues of memory and fiction seem to be at odds with the position of an exile writer and representation of nationalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Latvian-American literature
• exile
• World War II
• fiction
• memoir
• nationalism

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was delivered at ACLA 2018 seminar, “Beyond the Human Psyche: New and Critical Approaches to Violence and Trauma in Global Anglophone Literatures,” organized by Deniz Gündoğan-Ibrisim and Michaela Moura-Kocoglu. Thanks to my advisor at Washington University in St. Louis, Prof. Anca Parvulescu, and Prof. Erin McGlothlin for their kind help, as well as my friends S. A. Sukop and Ena Selimović for their language editing. The work on my final version of this article was supported by the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art, University of Latvia (under the project LFMI-BF-2019/1).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Latvian-American critic Lalita Muižniece in her review of Nesaule’s book refers to exuberance of such publications: ‘Especially in recent years, bookstores have whole shelves full of books, in which the childhood horror, helplessness, feeling of worthlessness, losing ground, conflicts with parents affects people’s lives, most of them women’ (Muižniece 1998, 50).

2. Among other ‘fraudulent’ autobiographical stories are fictionalized adolescent ‘memoirs’ Sarah (1999) and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things (1999) by J. T. LeRoy, whose true identity was revealed in 2005, and A Million Little Pieces (2003) by James Frey, a story of addiction that was exposed as a fiction three years later (see Franklin 2011).

3. Backshadowing is a view of the past events as inevitable to such an extent that their victims may be blamed for not anticipating them. Freud’s Nachträglichkeit is similar: it describes the process when later knowledge gives ‘belated’ meaning to an earlier event (Vice 2004, 14).

4. American-Latvians preferred the term ‘exiles’ (trimdinieki) as their self-identification, rather than ‘emigrants,’ in order to stress the political nature of their presence abroad and the unlawful occupation of Latvia by the Soviet Union.

5. For example: Andrups and Kalve (1954); Eglītis (1955); Lesiņš (1957); Ekmanis (1978); Stahnke (1984); Cedrins (1984), etc.

6. ‘Then, when Ms. Nesaule is 7, the war draws near, squeezing Latvia between the invading Nazis and the even more feared Russian partisans marauding from the East’ (Hampl 1996). The moment she obviously refers to is the fall of 1944 when the Nazis recede and the Red Army reinvades the territory of Latvia.

7. As Leena Kurvet-Käosaar adds in her analysis of the episode: ‘The narrative corresponding to the experience of women does not even exist on the communal level: it consists of fragmented threads of stories that women seldom try to combine into a larger whole. The title of Nesaule’s novel, A Woman in Amber, is in some sense a good metaphor for women’s history. Women’s stories exist, they are not completely forgotten or lost but at the same time they are frozen in the amber of prejudice and patriarchal norms’ (Kurvet-Käosaar 2003, 329).

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Notes on contributors

Karlis Verdins

Karlis Verdins is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis and a researcher at the Institute of Literature, Folklore, and Art, University of Latvia.