return
published: 2011-01-08I am reading “The Book of Eve” by Marianne Frederiksson. My sister lent it to me. She said, “it’s special.” Eve wanders around in a time when humans were primal beings and knew no languages, no words. Eva herself is a transitional being, her mother gave her words, and with that came a sense of time and space. Of past and future. She returns to where she came from and what she had entirely forgotten, hoping to find answers to the question: why? Why did my one son, the one I have always been afraid of, kill the other one?
And I wonder: why does one keep returning to places of the past? Is it an attempt to rearrange one’s youth, understand it? Essentially wanting to rewrite it by trying to find the right words, and putting them in the right order.
Yet with every return to have been further distanced from that past by time. To have been changed. And therefore with every return to keep rearranging, changing the order, over and over again.