The dream had already faded into irretrievability, not even a memory left behind.

Marking these dates is a weapon against the randomness of the past and its true distance and irretrievability.

There are many forms of exile in the novel, many opportunities for Gunesekera to meditate on the irretrievability of the past.

"At that moment," Ms. Wingard confessed, "I felt the irretrievability of the 10 years I'd lived before most of the women in the room were born."

The first concerns the alleged "irretrievability" of G. Stanley Hall's letters to Freud and Jung, inviting them to participate in the 20th-anniversary celebration of Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

And as in "Talking It Over," Mr. Barnes uses this device to explore some of the same themes that have animated his earlier novels like "Before She Met Me" and "Flaubert's Parrot": namely, the subjectivity of memory, the irretrievability of the past and the elusiveness of truth.