Reconstructing the past is, depending on whom you ask, a fool’s errand, a great hobby, or a vital source of knowledge and meaning. Many families have a de facto genealogist: a cousin or an uncle who loves Ancestry.com, spends hours digging for long-lost relatives, or organizes trips to their forebears’ hometowns. My husband’s grandfather, whose own grandfather immigrated to the United States from Scotland, felt so connected to that heritage that he attended reunions of their Scottish clan.
But for many, the desire to touch the past goes far beyond ancestry. If it didn’t, no one would travel to the sites of old battles or participate, unpaid, in historical reenactments—popular activities that suggest a wish to identify with bigger forms of history. Especially for people who can’t trace their family tree very far, reaching for a national or cultural past can be a way to feel grounded in their present self.
What Remains, an excellent debut novel by the Galician writer Brais Lamela, follows its unnamed narrator as he engages in one such quest. A graduate student, he gets sidetracked from his dissertation by his ever more obsessive drive to fully recreate life in the precise time and place he studies. It’s no coincidence that the place in question is the exact part of Galicia, a mountainous, mostly coastal region in northwestern Spain, where he grew up. The narrator now lives in New York, and over the course of the novel, Lamela makes clear that his protagonist’s determination to reconstruct the past soothes his sense that he’s untethered and alone in his adopted country.
Lamela, like his protagonist, is based in New York. He wrote What Remains in Galician, which is not spoken in most of Spain and isn’t a common literary language; his translator, Jacob Rogers, has noted that it’s “on the margins of the Spanish market.” For Lamela to write in Galician rather than Spanish, then, is an artistic expression of commitment to his particular roots. So is the subject of his narrator’s research—which is, inevitably, one of the main subjects of the novel itself.
In the 1950s, Francisco Franco, the right-wing dictator who ruled Spain from the end of its civil war until his death, in 1975, decided that Galicia’s rural peasants needed to be modernized. To do this, his regime built dams that submerged much of Negueira de Muñiz, an especially remote, alpine part of the region. The government then demanded that the drowned villages’ inhabitants migrate to a lowland area called the Terra Chá. As Lamela writes in a foreword, the dictatorship designed this colonization plan to “break the habits of these peasants, whom they saw as backward and poor, and turn them into modern cattle ranchers.”
The narrator is something of a dreamer who cannot research these events with the cool detachment that his thesis adviser recommends. Instead, he revels in an effort to recreate what’s gone. He imagines the peasants’ lives in vivid detail, straying from the evidence to conjure them listening to clandestine radio broadcasts in their bathrooms or yearning for the “particular shades of green or gray” that had characterized the now-flooded landscape of their home.
Before long, the narrator gets fully sucked into a perhaps-quixotic effort to learn about one of these people, a widow named Leonita who resisted the regime’s control. His irritated adviser asks, not comprehending, “Why would you want to focus on a single life?” To the narrator, the reason is clear: When he reads about Leonita, he can feel what it might have been like to get dropped, against your will, into a new home.
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Granted, the narrator isn’t a stranger to rootlessness. He emigrated voluntarily but still struggles with the “weightless and precarious” nature of living, without much money, far from home. As he gets ready to move in with his girlfriend, he reflects on how little he’s invested in the apartment he’s lived in for years. “I picked furniture that was easy to put together and take apart,” he notes, “as though I expected to leave at any moment.” Even after the move, the narrator seems most able to ground himself in his new home by wondering, “What would a group of archaeologists see if they happened upon the scene and tried to reconstruct our lives?” It is as if he can understand the world only through reconstruction, as if the process of recreation is, for him, a source of stability as much as it is an escape.
Lamela’s narrator might be an extreme case—the main characters of novels tend to be—but he’s hardly alone in seeking both solace and meaning in the past. If he were, historical fiction would be far less popular among readers and writers alike; Americans wouldn’t travel to the Alamo or Colonial Williamsburg, let alone their ancestors’ faraway homes. In the 2024 movie A Real Pain, cousins played by Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin visit the house in Poland where their deceased grandmother lived before the Holocaust. It’s not easy to get there, and the experience is anticlimactic at best—they try to leave stones outside as remembrances, something Jews traditionally do at graves, and the house’s residents immediately point out that they’re a tripping hazard—yet the film never doubts that the cousins’ attempt to touch their grandmother’s pre–World War II life will connect them more closely to their shared history.
In his 1998 book, Confederates in the Attic, the journalist Tony Horwitz joins a devoted Civil War reenactor named Robert Lee Hodge on an extreme quest to touch the past. Hodge takes a yearly trip, called the “Civil Wargasm,” that entails a week-long “high-speed trek from Gettysburg to Antietam to the Shenandoah Valley and dozens of battlefields in between,” dressed in the same reproduction-19th-century uniform and eating 19th-century rations the whole time. For Hodge, who at the time of Horwitz’s writing took a version of this journey once a year, the trip’s discomforts are a way to share what actual Civil War soldiers experienced. “This,” he tells Horwitz, “is the real deal.”
It isn’t, of course. Nobody can get the past back, no matter how scratchy and unwashed the uniform they’re wearing is. What Hodge’s march gives him is a chance to make his imagination tangible. He’s still playing Civil War, and Horwitz makes clear that Hodge knows it. Yet the reenactor is compelled enough by the meaning that he derives from this connection to the past to want to maximize it—hardtack, chewing tobacco, and all.
The physical discomfort that Hodge experiences during reenactments, however, doesn’t seem to extend to the moral realm. Over the course of Confederates in the Attic, it becomes clear that his minute attention to the details of the past allows him to avoid the big picture: When you’re imagining the individual hardships that one Confederate soldier endured, it’s easier to ignore the societal horror that he defended. Presumably for this reason, the reenactments Horwitz attends are all, as he writes, “blindingly white affairs.”
Most of the reenactors Horwitz meets are also somewhat blithe about Civil War deaths. Only once does Horwitz meet somebody, a nurse who plays a grieving Union widow, who treats her hobby less as a vacation from the present than as an acknowledgment of past loss. “Glory had a cost,” she tells Horwitz. “I’m here so people will remember that.” She seems to share a hope with the narrator of What Remains; both of them aspire to inhabit history so fully that they might create a home, or at least a moment of rest and acknowledgment, for its unsettled ghosts.
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Lamela’s narrator clearly also wants his dissertation, especially his Leonita research, to create a home of some sort for the unsettled parts of himself. In that sense, he has something in common with Hodge. Both want to ground themselves in essentially fictional connections—or at the very least, ones that can’t be reciprocated—to other people in another time. Kirstin Valdez Quade, in her story “The Five Wounds,” tells a clear version of this tale through a religious reenactment. Her main character, a man consumed by regret about his life, is cast as Christ in his small town’s annual reenactment of the Passion, and he immediately begins longing to give “a performance so convincing he’ll transubstantiate right there on the cross into something real.” Although he never convinces himself that he’ll become a messiah, he still imagines that acting the role might provide “total redemption in one gesture, if only he can do it right.”
In What Remains, Lamela’s narrator attaches the same hope to his reconstruction of Leonita’s life and the lost towns of Negueira de Muñiz. By dreaming that he can bring back some version of the Galician past, he manages to indirectly express a profound desire to at once connect himself permanently to the region that he left and prove that he can still be of service to it. It’s a hope for the rootless, and one that demonstrates the truest appeal of recreating the past. Whether your reconstruction is a novel or a dissertation, a Civil War reenactment or a trip to your grandmother’s hometown in Poland, the very act of reassembling what’s gone promises that even the most adrift person can be anchored, somehow, in time.