„The French, when they can’t remember something, blame it on a „hole in the memory”. Through the hole in my memory have passed not only the names of the people I met 10 minutes ago, the combination for the lock on my suitcase and the plots of Henry James’s novels, but also some inner sense of who I was at various times in my life. Looking over my shoulder, I regard whole chapters of my past as the misadventures of a stranger, though of course the stranger was me. A