Reclaiming the past: a dubious task: Analysis of the book Nas Tuas Mãos, by Inês Pedrosa

This book presents an analysis of Nas Tuas Mãos, by Portuguese writer Inês Pedrosa, based on the relationship between memory, imagination and narration. The novel's narrative structure is dissected, focusing on the influence of time on the characters' way of narrating. Through the analysis, we try to show how the return to the past undergoes re-readings loaded with feelings of personal (in)satisfaction, also marked by forgetfulness, which ends up being remedied by an affective memory (or invention). In this re-reading, we don't know about the characters' actions, we only know each protagonist's conception of them. One-sidedness and fragmentation have a direct effect on the re-reading of the past, so that it is not possible to turn back time again. The analysis of the narrative points to memory, imagination and narration as fundamental pieces in the retracing of the past: they are always together and the absence of one leads to a lack of understanding of the whole.