Down memory lane: It Will Come Back to You, by Sigrid Nunez, reviewed
Readers of Sigrid Nunez’s long-form fiction will be familiar with her concerns about storytelling: the gaps between what happened, what is remembered and what can be understood only through fictionalising. Her new collection of 13 stories, written across several decades, returns to questions of memory and the unreliability of narrative. The stories tend to have mundane settings: an insomniac awake late at night; a traveller stranded by a flight delay. Nunez is less interested in dramatic incidents than in the way a passing encounter can alter one’s understanding of life. Her narrators frequently find themselves re-evaluating past certainties or realising that events they thought they’d understood resist neat explanations.
