Memory and Space of the city of Manaus in the chronicle ‘Dried margins of the city’ (2013), by Milton Hatoum

Abstract

The Brazilian Amazônia, North region of the country, specifically, Manaus city, provided great part of the literary
production of Milton Hatoum. An example are the works: Tale of a certain Orient (1989), The brothers (2000), Ashes
of the Amazon (2005) and A lonely lurking (2013), in which we understand Manaus city as a constructed space and
evoked several times by the memorialist discourse of the author. In this way, we aim to discuss the evolution of
Manaus city space, from the relation among the memories constructed in childhood and the return to the same
spaces in adulthood, through a contrastive and explanatory analysis of the chronological time, inferring yet about the
place of memory in the process of the city reconstruction. Thus, this article has as corpus the chronicle Dried margins
of the city (2013), part of the collection A lonely lurking. The theoretical discussions were based on Assmann (2008;
2011), Halbwachs (2006), Bachelard (1993) and Tuan (2012), among others, in whom we supported the reflections
about memory and space. We aim that the discussions may reflect about the manauense city space, understood by
the narrator as a movement of decline, through the relation between past and present, from the moment of return to
the spaces of happiness to comprehend the effects of modernity over the man and over the city.