wait so in the House of Memory does Suzane actually find out what the truth was or does she just realize she can't trust anyone. because that's two different stories and one hits different
Seven suns over China and the fragility of truth
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This August marks two years since seven suns appeared to set over Chengdu , in southwestern China. The event was real—a documented fact—and it found its way into my novel, The House of Memory . The…
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wait so in the House of Memory does Suzane actually find out what the truth was or does she just realize she can't trust anyone. because that's two different stories and one hits different
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This August marks two years since seven suns appeared to set over Chengdu, in southwestern China. The event was real—a documented fact—and it found its way into my novel, The House of Memory. The story follows a visual artist forced to confront the lies told by her parents, her lovers, her friends, and the government.
By FISU, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=119642395
Suzane searches for the truth until, in a Kafkaesque turn of events, she is abducted and taken by force to an institution. In the novel, the House of Memory is a clinic that exists in São Paulo, although not everyone is able to see it. There, she is compelled to participate in an extraordinary social experiment: to forget the life we know. Although conceived as a "dystopia of the present," her story feels far more real than we might like to admit.
Outside fiction, we have become the characters, wandering between fact and fabrication. We live in a world where narratives often carry as much weight—or even more—than reality itself. President Donald Trump has repeatedly stretched the boundaries of reality, pushing them toward a point from which he appears to believe there can be no return. He has done so in relation to Brazil and other South American countries.
Now he is taking another gamble, like a trapeze artist performing without a safety net. He has presented the public with the claim that the upcoming U.S. midterm elections suffer from "shocking vulnerabilities." It echoes the same narrative once used to argue that Brazil's elections could not be trusted. From that premise follows another claim: that the United States should punish Brazil with sweeping tariffs for allegedly "persecuting" a former president convicted by Brazil's Supreme Court.
Seven suns did appear over Chengdu, but they were the result of a complex optical phenomenon. They represented one account of what happened—not the whole truth.
The full truth must emerge from the ballot boxes in both Brazil and the United States. Only then will we know whether we are living in fiction or in the reality of our own countries.
About the Author
I am a Brazilian writer and journalist. I hold a bachelor's degree in Journalism from the Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas (PUC-Campinas) and a master's degree in Social Sciences from the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), São Paulo.
I am a retired media consultant for the Media Strengthening Program in Mozambique, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented by IREX. Previously, I worked as a reporter and editor for Jornal Nacional, Brazil's leading television newscast on TV Globo, and as assistant editor at Folha de S.Paulo, one of the country's largest newspapers. I have also contributed pro-bono to Global Voices.
I am a two-time recipient of the Tim Lopes Award for Investigative Journalism, one of Brazil's leading journalism awards. #book #dementia #distopic #amazon #uiclap #china #novel
Thoughts
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The actual scary moment you're describing is when people stop caring which narrative is true. Not even trying to figure it out anymore. That's when it becomes fiction on purpose, and I don't think we come back from that easily.
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If narratives carry more weight than reality, does that mean reality disappears or just that we stop looking at it. The seven suns still happened whether we understood them or not. Are you saying the problem is that we've stopped checking, or that facts themselves have stopped mattering.
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I've sat in living rooms with people who can't separate what they were told from what happened, and it's real and it's devastating. They're not stupid and they're not lying; they just lost track. That fear you're describing, of living in separate narratives, I've watched it destroy marriages and families. It starts with small things.
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wait so in the House of Memory does Suzane actually find out what the truth was or does she just realize she can't trust anyone. because that's two different stories and one hits different
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I get the metaphor but Brazil's election actually happened and the results are what they are. Trump saying they had vulnerabilities doesn't change the audit trail or the actual ballots cast. Narratives might blur things but the election itself doesn't become fiction.
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The House of Memory sounds like it's diagnosing exactly this. A clinic that some people can't see, forcing people to forget what they know: that's the trap of living in separate narratives. The novel and the politics here are the same problem.
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But there's a difference between how we understand the truth and the truth itself, isn't there. Seven suns might have been an optical trick, but the phenomenon still happened. The lie isn't in how we describe it; it's in pretending there's no fact underneath at all. The danger is when we give up on the fact part entirely.
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This is exactly why I stopped caring about news narratives. They shift so fast that I can't track what's actually true anymore. I just know something happened and everyone's claiming a different version of it.