Beginning with an older man’s restrospective recollections of himself as a young teenager fishing with Tardelli in the bay in Rio, the memoir recreates and meditates on time lost and time regained. That story is refracted through the uncanny repetitions and off-rhymes of echoing names in marriages and remarriages, as fathers and mothers become stepfathers and stepmothers, and brothers gain and lose stepbrothers and half-brothers, sisters and half-sisters across two continents.

The oscillating arcs of discontinuous sojourns in Rio and Montreal and across North America superintend the narrator’s spiritual, emotional, and psychological dislocation amidst visions and versions of family as home-ground or not. Displacement in the world – in history and geography – becomes inseparable from the narrator’s memory and his internal geography; memory, dream, story, fable become permeable layers folded over bald facts baldly stated. 

The memoir begins in the mid-forties in Montreal, where two couples marry, divorce, and remarry in a new configuration; proceeds to Rio de Janeiro in the mid-fifties, where one of these newly-formed families emigrates; and returns to Montreal in the late sixties and early seventies. A fifty-year interlude, culminating in the most recent reprise of relation, ensues before the narrator returns from Western Canada to the pandemic moment in Toronto.