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In her short novel Florida (2004), Christine Schutt explores the multiple planes on which the traumatic absence of the narrator's mother is felt from childhood to adulthood. Freud's central concept of Nachträglichkeit sheds light on the modalities of the textual inscription of trauma. The temporal distorsions it entails account for the retroactive reverberation of events and signifiers in the novel. At the core of the narrative lies a very peculiar 'Florida,' an impossible place where all the embedded traumatic memories are engulfed.