Authority. Terms of Use | Privacy Policy, Stories That Teach: “The Rememberer” by Aimee Bender – Discussed by Sadye Teiser, craft elements he admires in Steven Barthelme’s story “Heaven.”, beautifully crafted sentences of Lauren Groff’s “Ghosts and Empties.”, interview we did with Aimee Bender herself, The Masters Review Volume VIII With Stories And Essays Selected by Kate Bernheimer. This was not unusual. DMCA and other copyright information | The Missouri Review is committed to providing access and accommodations for people with disabilities. He was always sad about the world. She mostly concentrates on other things and lacks imagination. Later it was published in August 1998, in her the anthology, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. Thanks to the combination of the sheer confidence that shimmers through Bender’s prose and a series of carefully placed details, we trust in the reality of the de-evolving lover within the tightly drawn world of this story. The Missouri Review is published by the College of Arts & Science of the University of Missouri, with private contributions and assistance from the Missouri Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Sometimes I think he’ll wash up on shore. He’s small. I would use “The Rememberer” as a way into talking about magical realism, one of my favorite genres. We’re all getting too smart. The narrator thinks that her lover is morphing into ever-simpler animal forms. Ben is Annie’s lover and the man who goes through reverse evolution. "The Rememberer" opens with two characters, Annie, the narrator and her lover, Ben. "We're all getting too smart. My wishes became generalized long ago, in childhood; I learned quick the consequence of wishing specific. . I didn’t even really care, then, not at first; I didn’t panic and call 911. If you are a student, faculty member, or staff member at an institution whose library subscribes to Project Muse, you can read this piece and the full archives of the Missouri Review for free. According to him, the whole process should take about a year, but from the way things are going, I think we have less than a month left. That’s all. A piece of speculative fiction, the story steps away from realism to explore what happens when devolution is literalized. All Rights Reserved. I make sure my phone number is listed. When we discussed “The Rememberer,” we identified the story’s inciting incident (the lover turns into an ape), plot points (for example: people call the house, asking where he is), and climax (the narrator decides to let her lover free in the ocean, before he disappears from her vision). I keep him on the counter, in a baking pan filled with saltwater. For example, when Annie and Ben have sex for the first time, she leaves the lights on and "concentrated really hard on letting go." The characters in Aimee Bender's “The Rememberer” and Franz Kafka's “The Metamorphosis” are all adjusting to life after their love ones started to change. I always worried this was a little self-indulgent: taking a day to cover a specific type of story when most of the class was devoted to the basics of fiction. It’s been a month, and now he’s a sea turtle. I coated him. There is a long flashback in the middle of the story, in which he complains to his girlfriend that people “think far too much.” The next day, he wakes up an ape. I went to the old biology teacher at the community college and asked him for an approximate timeline of our evolution. Writing any story involves a tacit agreement to do something crazy—to conjure a world and its characters entirely from your mind. For writers of realist and nonrealist stories alike, “The Rememberer” contains many examples of detail being used to build the bones of the story. At The Masters Review, our mission is to support emerging writers. I wanted to teach them that as long as they wrote with authority and had control over their own fictional worlds, there were no limits to the shapes and subjects their stories could take on. I chew whole packs of gum in mere minutes. When he reached for me, I said No, loudly, and he seemed to understand and pulled back. After Ben has turned into a sea turtle, Annie returns from work one day and discovers that he has again shifted, now into a salamander in the baking pan. Detail. “We think far too much.”. His eyes roll up in his head and I dribble honey into the water. He licks at it and then swims to the other end of the pan. If you need accommodations due to disability to access the content on this website, please contact us at 573-882-4474 or question@moreview.com for assistance. Annie, the protagonist, recounts the plight of her lover Ben, who is rapidly At the water’s edge, I stoop down and place the whole pan on the tip of a baby wave. We publish fiction and nonfiction online year round and put out an annual anthology of the ten best emerging writers in the country, judged by an expert in the field. “Even for writers who strictly follow the realist tradition, “The Rememberer” is a good lesson in sticking to your guns.
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