Memento: A Novel in Dreams, Thoughts, and Images by Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau

If Fellini met Kafka, the comical with the dark side of the absurd . . .

Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the monitor. Sine wants to recover from the months of tending to her mother who just passed away. When they arrive at the hotel, Sine is in a dream­like state . . .

With refined narrative mastery and extraordinary depth in exploring the unconscious, Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau confirms herself in this book as a writer of the highest caliber: the protagonists of the story move in a fluctuating, dreamlike dimension, between synchronicity and diachronicity, and page after page they become more real than real, just as in dreams. The tale weaves thread upon thread an initially enigmatic and puzzling tapestry, which gradually resolves into a picture of intense humanity where awe, sorrow, resentment, sweetness and gratitude find their proper place in the narrator’s heart. For the reader, a moving experience of recognizing the complexities of life and affection, without discounting or self-deception, in a story dreamed and told with an unmistakable personal style.
–Stefano Bolognini, MD, IPA Past President

Memento is a poignant story of life, loss, tragedy, aging, death and birth. The main character Sine and her internal world and life are vividly captured through the images evoked within the reader with beautiful language. One is brought forwards and backwards within this personal world of Sine, her relationships to herself and others, and the loss and reappearance of them in many forms that populate her mind. As a psychoanalyst and novelist, Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau brings the reader into the world of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, or Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, where nothing makes sense, things are absurd, timeless and confused — and yet one can understand. This book is a journey through the labyrinth of the dream world and mind of the narrator and her characters.
–Abbot A. Bronstein Ph.D., Psychoanalyst, Writer, and Associate Editor International Journal of Psychoanalysis

 Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau’s Memento is a restorative, haunted Odyssey into memory, dreams and loss, fulfilling Freud’s observation in —Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming: “Past, present and future are threaded . . . on the string of the wish that runs through them.”
–Ellen Pinsky, PsyD, author of Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: Mortal Gifts.

The Author:
Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau is a Training and Supervising Analyst of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and the Swiss Psycho­ analytic Society. She has published widely on metapsychology, clinical issues and applied psychoanalysis, most recently Driven to Survive (2018) and Memory’s Eyes: A New York Oedipus Novel (2020). She is the Chair of the IPA in Culture Committee and works in private practice in Massachusetts.