The Back Cover
Hannah Stephenson
In her latest work of creative non-fiction, Barbara Hodgson acts as curator, tour guide, and host. Trading in Memories is a collection of stories based on Hodgson’s collection of objects gathered while travelling. Hodgson’s souvenirs are anything but traditional: an x-ray of a man’s hand found in Brussels, a political poster torn from a wall in Naples, a 19th century playing card hidden in the pages of an old book in Budapest. Rather than purchasing pricey and touristy souvenirs, Hodgson celebrates those with the “potent ability to evoke time and place.”
Trading in Memories is organised into eighteen sections of international cities, including London, Damascus, Tangier, Shanghai, Los Angeles, and Vancouver (where Hodgson lives). She explains that she researches a destination before she travels there, and creates a scrapbook based on her experiences. Hodgson’s historical and sensory descriptions are dizzyingly detailed; fortunately, her style remains (disarmingly) natural and earnest, and this prevents the book from sounding like a textbook. For instance, two pages in her Istanbul chapter are entirely devoted to the names, dates, nationalities, and sums within a single stack of 1920’s financial and business documents. As if it were the most ordinary sentiment, Hodgson intones (in my favourite chapter), “I left with the sensation that no amount of sightseeing in Fez could ever have replaced the pleasure of looking for a portable Arabic typewriter.”
The narrative’s illustrations are inviting, strange, colourful images of Hodgson’s treasures: luggage labels, feathers, old medical equipment, archaic maps. Hodgson’s love of the storied, cast-off object is contagious. She explores her own compulsion to collect, explaining that in studying a city’s “material secrets…Expectations of place are turned upside down, and whole new cities are revealed, as the stories behind the objects and those selling them are considered.” Trading in Memories is deliciously disorienting; most intriguing is the urgency with which Hodgson collects and recollects. |
