The title of this book is apt as, rather than a family memoir, it is more of an epitaph to vanished memory itself. As the author admits: “The search for the past, like the search for the Holy Grail, separates the successful from the failures, and I belong to the latter: assiduous, but unlucky. I have never lost my hope of discovering the kernel at the centre of the mystery, a key of some sort which opens the door to a secret corridor in our old apartment, where a shaft of sunlight falls on a host of other unseen doors.”

The quest was a difficult one as Stepanova tries to reconstruct her family history which covers a momentous period in Russian and Soviet history. It is not surprising that evidence of the lives of ordinary individuals in that period of terror and upheaval is difficult to come by, and that even those who might have memories are unwilling or unable to reveal them. It is to the credit of Stepanova that her mainly unsuccessful efforts help to illustrate just what a difficult period the first half of the twentieth century was for an ostensibly middle class family with some Jewish connections. The story, which is pieced together in a rather haphazard way, comes together by the end of the book. The journey there was somewhat confusing for me as I found it difficult to integrate sections, such as the reflections on the numerous self-portraits of Rembrandt in the chapter of Selfies and their Consequences, with the main family story. But perhaps that is my shortcoming as selfies are an integral component of memory or perhaps it is false memory as they remain transfixed in the moment. Part of what Stepanova is trying to convey is how we often want to remember things differently from the way they actually were, and her family history bears this out.

This is definitely a book that would be worth a second reading when one is less concerned with the story and able to reflect on what the author reveals about memory, and indeed life, itself.