Esmond and Ilia: An Unreliable Memoir

English professor Warner (Alone of All Her Sex) reimagines the post-war lives of her parents in this fanciful memoir. “Itemise the things that you know,” Warner writes, “because they belonged to them and through them became part of you.” The items are her parents’ belongings, an inventory Warner sifts through as she recreates the couple’s journey from 1940s Italy, to post-colonial Cairo, to Brussels, and ultimately, back to Britain. After meeting and marrying in WWII Italy, Ilia and Esmond relocated to Cairo to establish a branch of the British bookstore W.H. Smith. Warner tediously conjures this post-colonial realm from her father’s letters to “the old-boy network,” her mother’s journals, and sundry objects of Esmond’s that encapsulate “a way of life, a class and its expectations.” Building toward Warner’s first memory—the sight of her father’s burned-out bookstore in the 1952 Cairo Fire, the same fire that would ignite the Egyptian revolution—the author employs fictionalizations to speculate about difficult realities: her father’s sexuality, her mother’s unhappiness, and Warner’s worry that she bears “the stamp of colonial ambivalence”—a concern that seems validated when she weighs in on blackface: “in the traditions of the Caribbean carnival, dancers and masqueraders repay the travesties in kind.” This hefty memoir is steeped in imperial whimsy that will either delight or exhaust. (June)