I began writing An Interview with a Trout in March, right after we finished reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. With all of the texts involved in the second half of the Haruki Murakami class, one theme that reverberated in my head was how family can come to represent latent memory and one’s cyclical history. These stories made me think about my own family history and the potential stories that could hold a prophecy on my own life. Both sides of my family had no ties to the United States before the 20th century. When it comes to my mother’s side of the family, I know little to nothing about who my grandfather was, who his parents were, and his pilgrimage to the United States in order to find the American Dream like so many others. The mystery behind his move toward an ideal land and the loss of that ideal and memory from the coming generations resonated as I read through the tales of Macondo and the Buendia family. I included other elements from Kafka on the Shore and Raymond Carver’s stories, such as the adventure/mystery story surrounding gaps in where one’s family and latent memory comes from, and laconic writing style. And, in fact, I was inspired by my own essay for the midterm: the reclaiming of a certain kind of narrative from the perspective of a world where the narrative has been lost already.
