In the Fog with Karen

Reflections on Memory, Identity, and the Mysteries We Carry

There are books that you read, and then there are books that read you—that peer into the uncertain spaces of your own identity and ask uncomfortable questions about who you think you are. Ana Teresa Pereira's Karen (Relógio D'Água, 2016) is decidedly the latter kind of book, a slim yet profound meditation on identity, memory, and the roles we inhabit that won the prestigious Prémio Oceanos in 2017.

Entering the Fog

From its opening pages, Karen pulls you into disorientation. A woman wakes in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar house, with no memory of arrival. A man named Alan—claiming to be her husband—tells her she is Karen, recovering from an accident near a waterfall. Yet her internal landscape tells a different story: she remembers a solitary life as a painter in London, a flat with a cat, the anonymity of gallery openings, the freedom of a life that belonged only to herself.

This is where Pereira's genius begins to unfold. The central question isn't "what happened?"—the familiar territory of conventional mysteries—but rather "who am I?" As the narrator navigates the cold, misty Northumberland countryside, she begins to slip into Karen's clothes, Karen's routines, Karen's life. The question haunts every page: Is she Karen suffering from amnesia? An impostor who has stumbled into a vacant role? Or perhaps a character in someone else's narrative, being written into existence?

A Master of Atmosphere and Ambiguity

What makes Pereira such a singular voice in Portuguese literature is her uncanny ability to write as if she's translating from English—her prose carries the cadence and atmosphere of mid-twentieth-century English literature or American noir, despite being originally written in Portuguese. Born in Funchal, Madeira, she maintains a reclusive presence in the literary world, rarely granting interviews or making public appearances. This withdrawal from the spotlight seems fitting for an author so obsessed with the performance and construction of identity.

The book's structure mirrors its protagonist's fragmented consciousness. Brief, breathless chapters create a circular, dreamlike narrative that blurs the boundaries between waking life, memory, and cinematic scenes. Reading Karen feels less like following a story and more like wandering through thick fog where familiar shapes dissolve into shadows. The cold, damp English countryside, the dark house perpetually shrouded in rain—these aren't merely settings but characters themselves, pressing against the narrator's uncertain sense of self.

Cinema as Reality, Reality as Performance

Pereira's text is saturated with references to film and literature, but she doesn't simply reference cinema—she writes as if describing a movie. Lighting, gestures, dialogue all feel staged, reinforcing the unsettling notion that life itself might be a performance. The narrator becomes an actress learning her lines, and we're never quite sure if we're watching reality or a scene that's been rehearsed countless times before.

This intertextuality invites inevitable comparisons. There's the obvious echo of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca—the second wife entering a house dominated by the memory of the first, the imposing housekeeper Emily who, like Mrs. Danvers, views the newcomer with suspicion. There's Hitchcock's Vertigo, with its theme of a man attempting to remake a woman into the image of lost love. And there's Cornell Woolrich's I Married a Dead Man, with its premise of stepping into another woman's life after an accident.

Yet Karen transcends these influences, becoming something distinctly its own—a postmodern deconstruction that questions the very foundations of identity and memory.

The Unreliable Architecture of Self

At the heart of the novel are three figures caught in an ambiguous dance. The narrator serves as our unreliable guide—passive on the surface, yet her internal monologue remains sharply analytical, constantly questioning the reality presented to her. She is, in the novel's own terms, "a void waiting to be filled," and this emptiness becomes both her vulnerability and her strange power.

Alan embodies ambiguity itself—part romantic lead, part captor, perhaps a director trying to mold the narrator into the wife he desires or remembers. And Emily, the housekeeper, serves as gatekeeper to a past that may or may not have existed, her suspicion heightening our sense that the narrator is fundamentally an intruder in this carefully constructed world.

What Lingers

Pereira doesn't offer easy answers. Through the thriller's framework, she advances a philosophical argument: the self is a construction, memory is unreliable, and we are all, to varying degrees, strangers to ourselves. The book challenges us to abandon our need for concrete resolution and instead embrace existence's fundamental ambiguity.

The mystery of "who is Karen?" resolves philosophically rather than forensically, which may frustrate readers seeking conventional plot satisfaction. And for those familiar with Pereira's other works, the recurring motifs—England, rain, identity swaps, cinematic references—might feel like variations on familiar themes. Yet here, these elements are perfected, distilled into their purest form.

A Lifelong Conversation with Shadows

Reading Karen felt like returning to a conversation I've been having with myself since childhood. I cannot remember a time when I wasn't drawn to the architecture of mystery, to the play of light and shadow that noir fiction casts across the screen of consciousness. As a young reader, I discovered that mysteries were never really about solving crimes—they were about confronting the enigma of human nature itself, about learning to live with ambiguity rather than resolving it.

Hitchcock taught me early that the most terrifying mysteries aren't those that hide in dark alleys but those that emerge in broad daylight, in ordinary domestic spaces that suddenly reveal their capacity for strangeness. Watching Vertigo for the first time—and then the second, third, and countless times after—I learned that obsession with identity, with the impossibility of truly knowing another person, could become a kind of philosophical inquiry disguised as suspense. Scottie Ferguson's desperate attempt to remake Judy into Madeleine was never just a plot device; it was a meditation on desire, projection, and the violence we commit when we refuse to see others as they are.

The noir novels I devoured—Chandler, Hammett, Woolrich, later Modiano and Auster, among many others—created a vocabulary for understanding how we construct meaning from fragments, how we narrate ourselves into existence. Each detective stumbling through fog, each protagonist with amnesia, each unreliable narrator became a mirror reflecting my own questions about consciousness and selfhood. These weren't escapes from reality but deeper investigations into its nature.

So when I encountered Pereira's Karen, it felt less like discovering a new book and more like recognizing an old friend who'd been waiting in the fog all along. Here was an author who understood viscerally what Hitchcock knew, what the noir masters intuited: that identity is performance, that memory is fiction, that the boundary between who we are and who we're pretending to be exists only in our desperate insistence that it must.

The book spoke to something I've carried through decades of reading and watching and thinking about these questions. It reminded me why I've always been drawn to stories where certainty dissolves, where the ground beneath our feet turns out to be as unstable as fog. There's a peculiar comfort in this recognition—not the comfort of answers, but the comfort of finding language for questions I've been asking my entire life.

Pereira's achievement is that she doesn't merely reference the tradition of mystery and noir; she transmutes it into something both familiar and startlingly new. Reading Karen was like watching all those Hitchcock films again for the first time, like rediscovering why noir fiction captivated me as a child and continues to haunt me as an adult. She reminds us that these genres endure not because they provide escape but because they offer a peculiar form of truth—that we are all, in the end, mysteries to ourselves, narratives we construct and reconstruct with each passing day.

A Book That Haunts

Reading Karen is a hypnotic experience. The prose is elegant and economical—not a word wasted—yet it creates a sense of claustrophobia that paradoxically opens into vast questions about consciousness and existence. It's a book that lingers long after the final page, leaving a ghostly afterimage in the mind.

This is a novel for those who love atmospheric mystery and Gothic fiction, for cinema enthusiasts who appreciate Hitchcock and film noir, for readers drawn to Patrick Modiano's explorations of memory or Paul Auster's metaphysical mysteries. It's particularly compelling for anyone interested in Portuguese literature that breaks from traditional realism to explore the uncertain territories of consciousness and identity.

In our approximately 110 pages together, Pereira invites us to consider a disquieting possibility: that identity might not be something we possess but something we perform, that the boundaries between who we are and who we're pretending to be might be far more permeable than we'd like to believe. In the fog of Karen's world, we confront our own uncertainties—and perhaps that's exactly where the most profound recognitions occur.