Unreliable Narration & Loss

The Lost Book of Adana Moreau focuses—as the title would suggest—on the idea of missing or conflicting information. The timeline of the book alone indicates that the reader is unlikely to have a full understanding of any of the characters, at least not at first. The novel begins in 1916, and the first chapter spans fourteen years, until 1930. The novel then jumps to 2004 and 2005, and then jumps back to the 1930’s. I thought it would be interesting to note what was happening globally as well as locally (to our characters) at these times and then use that information to reflect on the idea of history as an unreliable narrator.

We know that the book begins with Adana Moreau having to flee the Dominican Republic as a result of her parents’ murders (which were a result of the American occupation.) We then go to 2004, when Saul’s grandfather dies. In this section spanning from 2004 to 2005, we get a sliver of Saul’s backstory, and find out that his parents were killed in a terrorist attack by a Palestinian Liberation group. His father was Israeli and his mother was American—his grandfather who he grew up with was his maternal grandfather.

Of course a central theme of the 2004-2005 section is Hurricane Katrina, which has nothing to do with Saul’s backstory (which we don’t get much of to begin with.) Saul is led to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in search of Maxwell Moreau: Adana Moreau’s son. The introduction of Max as a character brings us to the next section, which takes place in 1930. Maxwell’s mother (Adana) has passed away from cancer (just like Saul’s grandfather will one day) and Maxwell finds himself alone, if not completely orphaned. So with that, we find our three “main” characters—if they can even be called that—orphaned. The time jumps combined with the fact that the primary characters have limited knowledge of their own family history due to being orphans creates a very unusual narrative style where both the narrator and the reader are left in the dark on many things.

In terms of history being an unreliable narrator, one must first ask the question of what is a reliable narrator? Fiction can obviously never be a completely reliable narrator at its core, and personal storytelling runs the risk of being biased. With that being said, I think what history—and this book, in a sense—are missing is that personal factor, regardless of its unreliability. We as readers are getting snippets of many different lives over the course of decades, all over the world. It may not be the gaps in time that inhibit the reader from fully understanding, but the number of stories. You can never really understand what someone has gone through unless you hear from them directly: and in the case of the stories explored in this novel, a snippet of a conversation will never encapsulate the human, emotional experience of displacement and loss on these levels. I feel that what the book may be exploring, that can be so frustrating as a reader, is the idea that true history, and stories of humanity, die with people. All of the families in this narrative have been displaced and torn apart. Saul feels that he has to find Maxwell Moreau because he doesn’t understand his grandfather’s life, and because clearly Maxwell is missing an important part of his late mother’s.

Saul reflects on this concept of historical displacement as a silencer, saying “disaster as guilt, self-reproach for earning a salary from disaster while in other places, other people with his same forehead, earlobes, teeth, skin, and voice were invisible—displaced from time and history—as if a thousand mile fog had settled over that southern continent,” (Zapata, 167.) The mention of the physical characteristics of these ‘invisible’, ‘displaced’ people seems relevant to this point: it is features as mundane as earlobes and skin itself that make people human. And yet, in the eyes of history their humanity is not recognized, because history is written by those who win wars, and they were the people silenced in those wars.

In terms of the frustration readers may feel reading this novel, I think it stems from that lack of emotional background. I thought that one of the most impactful moments of this novel was when Saul was reflecting on his grandfather’s death, and thinks to himself, “Am I an orphan again?… Fuck, I’m too old to be an orphan,” (Zapata, 54.) This moment was one of the few moments so far reading the novel where I felt that personal sadness for a specific character that we are accustomed to feeling while reading fiction, as opposed to a general sadness.

We rarely get personal reflections like this from the characters in this novel, and while it felt gratifying to get that from Saul, I wonder if Zapata is intentionally withholding emotional content like that from the reader to make his point about destroyed families creating unreliable and unfinished history. All of the historical context of what’s happening at the times of these characters’ lives is unreliable history in the making, because of their loss.