These Threads Who Lead to Bramble: Essays

In this sublime essay collection, novelist Persson (The Way of Florida) interrogates the unreliability and inventiveness of historical memory. Weaving his own imperfect recollections of childhood and vague impressions of his family history with studies of eccentric and marginalized 20th-century artists, he emphasizes that it is not fact but rather aesthetic memories laden with sentiment that define stories about the past (“What’s recalled returns... not by some desire to remember but by the taste of mint in the back of your throat or by a slanted light through amber curtains”). Beginning the volume with a reflection on his fractured recollections (“often false, just a near version of what was”) of a formative road trip he took as a teenager, Persson then turns to the biographies of a trio of lesser-known composers—Alban Berg, Erik Satie, and Anton Webern—whose life stories he partially invents based on his interpretations of their music (“In the first movement of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite... Alban first learned his bones were in him. Then Alban learns his bones would change and this is in night”). The stakes of Persson’s thesis grow as later essays—including a breathtaking first-person embodiment of the mind of Austrian artist Egon Schiele while he was imprisoned on obscenity charges—focus on how artists, through their mastery of the aesthetics of storytelling, can alter how the present will be remembered. This astonishes. (Feb.)