MEMORY(S) IN LA DISTANCIA QUE NOS SEPARA

Abstract

This article presents a reading of the construction of memory (or memories) in the novel La Distancia que nos Separa (2015), by Renato Cisneros. The Peruvian journalist and author bases the narrative on tenuous and porous links between biography, fiction and history, all open to the multiple signs of understanding. In this analytical proposal, we read the work as self-fiction, where the narrator unearths the father figure of Luís Federico Cisneros Vizquerra – better known as El Gaucho Cisneros, general of the División del Ejército Militar del Perú –, to challenge an obsession: the search for identity. Returning to the past presents itself as a way of reading the present and oneself. Supported by AÍNSA (2012), RICOUER (2010), SARLO (2007), we interpret that the understanding of 'memory', in the aforementioned work, is engendered on an idea of permanent construction, challenging any finished version of these experiences, identities and narrated writing.