"Lost on Me" by Veronica Raimo and translated by Leah Janeczko — Reviewed by S.D Munawara
Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo and translated by Leah Janeczko
Reviewed by S.D Munawara
Veronica Raimo’s auto-fictional novel Lost on Me reads like the evocative and articulate diary I have always wanted to keep. It covers the formative experiences—first-time sex and fond friendships, childish games and emerging artistry—alongside uninhibited portraits of death, grief, and neurosis. It is Raimo’s latest work, and follows a literary career based primarily in Italy that includes translation, screen-writing, short stories, and poetry.
The novel rejects a chronological structure. One chapter begins as follows: “Up until I was nineteen I didn’t sleep with anyone. Well, that’s not exactly true, but I’ll get back to that later.” The narrator, also named Veronica, is unconcerned with the disarrayed state of her memories, and does not attempt to offer coherence or harmony in her retelling. She flips between narrating the events of her childhood, her adolescence, and adulthood unceremoniously. The setting switches rapidly from grade school classrooms to literary festivals, the characters age up and then down in the span of pages, and the absence of linearity means her deceased father is regularly resurrected by the narrative.
Her memories, she admits, are of little value. She describes them as “dirt cheap, half off,” the process of recollection as “a matter of deciding whether the game is pointless or rigged.” Raimo divorces memory from remembering, partitions memory from truth, even withdraws memory from a communal experience to the private sphere:
My mother claims that, when given the chance to start school a year early like my brother did, I replied, “No thank you, Mamma. I want to be like everyone else.”
I doubt that at age five I had the wherewithal to utter anything of the sort…
The history of her family is further complicated by the stories within, the fictions the characters tell themselves and each other. The novel is fraught with every kind of lie; the benign and the paranoid, the grandiose and the self-indulgent, alter egos and imaginary friends, plagiarism and omission. Raimo describes Veronica as a child stealing two artworks from an eighth grade class and passing them off as her own to her family’s delight. In her senior year of high school, she finds an imaginary friend in Fitzgerald’s Amory Blaine and sends letters about a life she’s invented to her friend Cecilia abroad. She belatedly decides that nineteen is when she lost her virginity as she has no clarity regarding her own sexual history, and at thirty-eight she smothers the fact of her published writing to bond with a boy at a bar. It is a dizzying tangle of fantasy and fraudulence.
Her father, mother, and brother are similarly afflicted with a tendency for falsification, and while there is certainly tension between their dissimilar memories, there is also reinforcement of one another’s lies. The running motif that “Veronica likes to draw” is a persona constructed collaboratively. The process is described as happening almost out of her control—“it had been decided”—and so when Veronica thieves two paintings and claims them as her own she is only cementing the existing image of herself as an artist, rather than concocting the façade herself. Lying is motivated and facilitated by an audience, Lost on Me suggests, and the intimacy and ever-presence of the family unit means that the household inevitably becomes a site of shared mistruths. As an adult, Veronica wonders if her mother would even believe the facts of the artwork’s origins. The fib is not hers alone, and thus she cannot dispel it.
Despite the murky instability of memory present throughout the narrative, it is no less surprising when the narrator’s misconstruction of her father’s infidelity is revealed late in the narrative. In her father’s home in Ascoli, Veronica discovers affectionate love letters from a woman named Rosa addressed to her father, and asserts pages later that she doesn’t remember anything of those letters and is unsure that they even exist. “The truth is…” is how the passage starts, a moment in which the reader reckons with being the object of Veronica’s lies rather than her co-conspirator.
Prior to this point, the novel is almost confessional, as if the narrator is seeking a form of remission from the reader by rectifying the various falsehoods that have come to define her life. She is rarely caught in her deception and so the divulgence of the supposed truth feels like a privilege reserved for the audience, a window into reality whilst the novel’s characters remain deluded by her. The flippant disclosure of the invented letters reveals that Veronica’s duplicity is in fact ongoing and inclusive of the reader and suggests that although she is presenting an exposé of her life, that is no indication of an actual commitment to candour.
The degradation of trust between reader and narrator is tempered by a concluding statement; that a story is an ambiguous concept. The structure of the novel reflects this notion and frees readers to appreciate prose that might have been dismissed as diversionary, cyclical, or inessential in a more conventional and chronological narrative. Memories, lies, dreams, identities are all forms of narrative that circumnavigate honesty, accuracy, and cohesion. Lost on Me forces the reader to accept that stories need not answer questions, least of all honestly. Like Veronica says of the fictive diary she wrote as a child to amuse her mother: “Nothing in it was true, and I was overcome with affection.”
Lost on Me is, perhaps too inconspicuously, a novel about writing. References to the assemblage of the book and the narrator’s authorial background blip on the surface of the text with enough regularity to remind the reader of where the narrative will conclude. “We can’t both write a book about our family,” the narrator, Veronica, tells her brother at some point, to which he responds, “Why not?”
“Up until that moment,” Veronica states, the fact of her brother also being an author was “mutually beneficial,” and her immediate intolerance towards his input is an acknowledgement of how the family threatens her constructed version of events. The prologue to the novel describes writing as a process of annihilation, in which the writer confronts “a terrible fate in the desperate attempt to kill off mothers, fathers, and siblings only to once again find them inexorably alive.” The family at the centre of Lost on Me is one characterised by contention. In assembling a book about her loved ones, Veronica perceives herself not as their spokesperson, but as an agent of their destruction.
At the novel’s conclusion, Veronica is flustered when questioned by a friend on why she writes. She wonders why it is difficult to articulate meaning, and muses that “it seems like the truth might exist only in reticence.” The communication of any memory, the novel proposes, is a deeply flawed process. Memories are susceptible to being tainted by intentional fictionalisation, genuine forgetfulness, or the contrary accounts of those with an alternate perception, and above all, are transmuted in the journey from mind to language. Lost on Me suggests any story told is distorted.