MIND MOVES:A story about memory; how it shapes our lives, writes TONY BATES
“We had come this far. No further than that. But this far.”
– Henning Mankell
(Italian Shoes)
SOMETIMES WHEN you read a book you come across a sentence that lifts you and carries you to a place where you look at your life in a fresh way. There was something beautifully simple about these closing words of Italian Shoesthat did that for me.
Known more for his crime fiction series starring the all too human detective Kurt Wallander, this book is a novel that takes the reader on a different kind of adventure. The plot is vertical rather than horizontal. What happens on the surface acts as a prompt to take you deeper into the inner life of a man who has taken refuge on an island to hide from the world and from himself.
Italian Shoesis about the mistakes we make and how we can go to great lengths to bury painful memories. About how life tugs away at us until we finally confront these memories and make peace with them.
The hero, a surgeon, makes a mistake when operating on a woman, by accidentally amputating her healthy arm, instead of her diseased limb.
Disgraced and ashamed, he chooses to live alone on a deserted island. Until one day, 12 years later, he sees a figure struggling across the ice towards him, and his past catches up with him.
It’s a story about memory and the role it plays in shaping our lives. Without it, we can’t move on, we cannot envision a future. In choosing to run from his past, this man had amputated a part of his own identity.
He lived for years in a kind of dreary depression, until life pulled him out by the ears and opened him up to pain.
I hope I am not giving too much away when I say that as each layer of his protective wall is torn down, he begins to assume a greater humanity and generosity of spirit.
He doesn’t make this journey alone. His solitude is both disturbed and blessed by several people whose lives are also broken. At first, he bitterly resents their intrusion, but gradually he begins to recognise their gift and to respond to them with an empathy that opens his heart, and heals his life.
Like many of you who picked up a novel from a bookstand this summer in the hope of some welcome distraction, I picked up this book to escape reality for a while.
But as I read it over the summer, the days were punctuated with reports of riots and wars, economic instability and human tragedy, which were hard to ignore. Something about this man’s journey resonated with all I heard, with the craziness of human life and the way it can seem too hard to bear at times.
In the face of numerous threats we naturally look to the future and plan for our survival. We think about how we are to cope with the world and with whatever may be waiting for us around the next corner. We push forward and brace ourselves for the next news bulletin, the next phone call, which may shape the path our lives will take.
Art reminds us of who we are and how far we have come. This book reminded me that making peace with our past and appreciating the struggles we have endured are key to our sense of identity and belonging in the world. That the courage we need to face the uncertainty of the future comes from recognising where we have come from, and appreciating that part of us that has never given up.
“Though we live in a world that dreams of ending,” as Brendan Kennelly wrote, “something that will not acknowledge conclusion insists that we forever begin.”
Mankell’s book also points to the way we recover our ability to live soulfully in the world. The hero does not so much figure things out, as much as he opens himself to what is around him, to other people and their need of him, and to the physical circumstances of his life that require his attention. In facing the simple and profound problems at hand, his heart is prized open and he rediscovers who he is. His problems “solve him” and bring him to a place where he can stand in his own skin and face his destiny.
Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong – the National Centre for Youth Mental Health (headstrong.ie)