As sometimes happens, I'm reading two books at the same time: Bill Bryson's 'Notes from a Small Island'(a day by day account of his 8 week walk around Great Britain) and David Bergen's 'The Time In Between'(the story of an American Vietnam War vet revisiting Vietnam after 30 years). There was no real plan with these two books, I just happened to find them around the house. Coincidence.
What I've come to notice is the complete opposite representation of history, or perhaps memory, that the two books represent.
Bryson revels in how Great Britain '...manages at once to be intimate and small scale and at the same time packed and bursting with incident and interest. ... in the space of a few moments you pass the home of Christopher Wren, the buildings where Halley found his comet and Boyle his first law, the track where Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile ... a landscape packed with centuries of busy, productive attainment.'
Contrast this to Bergen's book where history and therefore memory is actively forgotten. There is good reason for this. Most recently the horrors of the Vietnam War: 3M killed, 30k missing, 2M injured, 1M widowed. 'And we have suffered a lot. It was Americans who invaded Vietnam. It was not our desire to fight.'
As the veteran's daughter tries to find some closure, she finds an old man in the village is content to eat his soup and sleep in a dry bed, with 'no wish to tunnel back through the years.' And that time is both scarce and never-ending, '...from a certain point onward there was no turning back and that it was important to reach that point'.
There is a similar theme of actively not remembering (although some continue to) in Madeleine Thein's 'Do Not Say We Have Nothing'. Of course, in China, this was part and parcel of Mao's Cultural Revolution.
I'm not sure what to make of this, I hesitate to make conclusions, so will just offer these observations.
