A complex evocation of the elusive, beautiful Sarah Cameron whose intermittent appearances over forty years have provided Hellman with a tantalizing, inconsistent mosaic of fantasy, deliberate falsehoods, and touches of unalloyed evil.
A brief work that uses real people, some of them well known (Dashiell Hammett, William Wyler, and others), and autobiographical events to underlay a story that could be said to be both memoir and fiction. I count this as partly fiction because on several levels the main character is unsure of events, so that the details supporting her story become quite tenuoushence the books title. She is uncertain because she cannot determine exactly when some events occurred in relation to others or where she learned of some of these events that have become old memories of hers, memories that have been modified by time and the emotional needs of the rememberer. She cannot align the contradictory realities of some events, such as the reported death of the bizarre woman near the center of all this, called Sarah, partly because of the haze of alcohol, drugs, and travel and because some information reported to her by others may or may not be true, and so forth. All of these blockages to knowledge match my own experience in trying to reconstruct certain long-ago events, and in that way I dont think there is anything else in the literature that so perfectly reveals the mental processes of explaining the stories of ones own life. The story related here is very small and personal to the narrator, but for me that is not where the book's charms lie. The books charms, beyond being a time machine of social attitudes that are quite dated + some of its humor, are Hellmans astute recreation of the mental processes of trying to get memory to hold still, to become solid, true, fully constructed, and "real." In its penetration into these processes, I would put this story alongside a work such as Mrs. Dalloway. I will reread in a year or two. I have the feeling this work will reveal much more on a second go-round. - Amazon.com review
ISBN: 0333304268
Pages: 106
Hardcover with dustjacket
Macmillan, 1980
Good condition; DJ soiled, edge-worn and chipped
B75
