This should be a tricks, I guess, but callippy don't mind, do you sweetie?

calypso: not at all. I'm involved too.

We've been reading "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" again and as usual it is dragging us back into our teens to the moments we first read it. Karenin*'s death surprised me this time, as I realised with a shock that the death of my sister Fiona's dog was almost identical in ceremony and that as my sister and I had been in intense negotiation at that point about the moral implications of euthanasia for her beloved dog it's likely that, unless she has also read the novel, at some point "I" (uil) described Karenin's death in detail.

I wonder if what happens when we read literature is that the episodic memory of the reading remains with the person who actually read the book, but perhaps the conversations afterwards might belong to someone else. Or, in this case, Francis heard about Karenin's death from whoever was reading the book at the time and without noticing anything else about the book she has taken that scene into her own memory.

We seem to store the story parts of novels seperately from any 'facts' we derive from them - with the facts often ending up being held in particular individual memory depending on their nature - so an interesting cultural gift or anecdote or tale-within-a-tale might make it to a person's own memory.

More later. This is a brooding in progress.
* the adorable dog named "Karenin" after Anna Karenina's husband Karenin and who is refered to as 'he' throughout the book. Karenin is actually a bitch - and there's a delightful scene (and fable about the innocence of animals) involving Tereza making homemade nappies for Karenin to wear when having his period.