Frank develops an obsession with Presley Smith, a patient suffering from this condition. It seems that the technology hasn’t been perfected yet, and some patients are tormented by random thoughts or dreams from their past lives. Frank Sina, the novel’s narrator, specializes in one of the procedure’s side effects: “nostalgia,” or leaked memory syndrome.

Humans who can afford it undergo procedures that implant “new memories in new bodies.”ĭr. In this new world reorder, scientific progress has unlocked the secret to immortality (or at least longevity) through regeneration of both bodies and minds. In the process, he rearranges Earth’s geography such that the U.S., Canada, and Europe all share a common border. Vassanji takes his readers to a future divided between the affluent First World, here dubbed the North Atlantic Alliance, and an amalgam of poor and underdeveloped countries. What makes Nostalgia much more than a literary novelist’s crack at the crowded market of work set in a dystopian future awash with impossibly beautiful and ethnically indeterminate youth is a series of philosophical and political questions that will not sound out of place in the present moment, as the world witnesses the ongoing global refugee crisis or that other tragedy, the U.S. On the surface, this slim but meaty volume may read like a departure into genre territrory – Vassanji does speculative fiction! – but the focus on characters searching for their true selves against the backdrop of a world divided between here and there is a holdover from earlier books.

Vassanji turns to the future in his new novel, somewhat ironically titled Nostalgia. Having previously mined his South Asian heritage, East African upbringing, and North American education in historically soaked fiction and non-fiction, M.G.

Nostalgia by mg vassanji