The Memory Chalet (2010)
Tony Judt
A memoir unlike any other; simultaneously transcendent and tragic. Tony Judt, renowned historian for works such as Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, is diagnosed with a rapidly advancing form of motor neuron disease (ALS) which quickly limits his mobility to just moving his neck and head; but allowing him to think and to talk. A vital man with a wife and young family, his world has too quickly become his room and his thoughts. Alone at night, unable to sleep and no longer able to write, he organizes and saves his thoughts – as a mnemonic device - in the rooms of a Swiss chalet he once visited as a child; accessing every morning for his secretary rooms in the chalet which hold and yield his thoughts in the form of a nearly completed essay (or feuilleton). Each feuilleton in The Memory Chalet is a rare, privileged, intimate and poignant insight into the workings of an encyclopedic mind trapped in a body which can no longer move. And, each essay though based on a personal recollection and ruthlessly honest, evolves into a broader mediation of historical insight and reflection accessible to everyone, whether it starts as Judt’s boyhood experience of riding a London bus route, travelling by car across America, attending a conference in Krasnogruda, Poland or becoming an American citizen.
