Revisiting the Past

The entire novel is framed as a return to the past. Teresa’s second journey to the town, nine years after her first, provides the narrative’s present, but the act of revisiting ensures that the past is never left behind. The structure is recursive: she revisits people and places she once knew, reads through her notebooks from the first trip, and measures the distance between her past and present selves. The effect is to reveal how memory alters both place and experience, producing a landscape where repetition is always shadowed by the impossibility of reclaiming the past.

Many details foreground this theme of similarity and change. Petros still has a dog, but it is not the one Teresa remembered, and the new animal does not evoke the same connection. This small substitution encapsulates the broader condition of her return: the familiar is recognisable...