Place, Silence, and Local Memory in Todo é silencio by Manuel Rivas

Abstract

This article addresses issues of local memory in Manuel Rivas’s novel Todo é silencio (2010) and takes as its starting point Pierre Nora’s twin notions of lieu de mémoire and milieu de mémoire. By focusing on a specific site portrayed in the novel —the escola de indianos, a building that once housed a progressive school— we analyze the ways in which the author deploys the building not merely as a setting, but also as aestheticization of the interstices between history, memory, and forgetting.