Customer Reviews

When I Forgot

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This small translated-from the Finnish book was simply beautiful. The microcosm of a family dealing w mental illness, while the world deals w the madness of 9/11. As an American, I tend to think 9/11 happened to "us", however this book desrcibes how everyone world wide was affected. The translator did a wonderful job in keeping the beauty and emotion intact. It is a beatifully written book about a sad subject, but written from the heart. The characters were described with such intensity, that I could actually see what they looked and smelled like.(you will understand this after reading) To say this book was about "a brother-sister relationship" misses the more global theme presented by the author. I was moved to tears by the description of Ian being confronted as "a war-monger" simply because he was an American. The conflicting emotions he felt while living in a foreign land during an American crisis, while disagreeing with his President- all in the context of a father ruined by Viet Nam...wow! Just a beautiful, beautiful book by an amazing writer. Don't miss the more global theme when reading it!!!

Critics seem to have praised this slim little novel extravagantly, using words like "potent, fragile, and tender" (NY Times); they also say that its fractured style and theme of mental breakdown perfectly fits the post-9/11 world. Well yes, but I found it a mess of a book in which a number of broken or fragile lives are somewhat arbitrarily brought together in a narrative that makes wild jumps between place, character, and period. This is due to the example of what appears to be Michael Cunningham's THE HOURS, which the heroine Anna (a Finnish reporter and part-time student, or vice-versa) has received as a gift from her visiting American professor and now lover, Ian Brown. Ian is an expert on Virginia Woolf (whose suicide is mentioned repeatedly); his father went mad after serving in Vietnam and is now hospitalized. Anna is the self-doubting daughter of a pastor with anger-management issues, and she has an elder brother also in mental hospital. Flashbacks, memories, and shared stories climax (for no particularly good reason) in a Helsinki demonstration protesting America's involvement in Iraq.

Virginia Woolf is fashionable just now as a referent; the psychological trauma of 9/11 is only just now beginning to be explored in fiction; and the Vietnam War indeed scarred an entire generation -- a legacy that might well be equalled by that of Iraq. But you can't just throw so many hot topics together and assume they will work. Had Hirvonen had the iron control of Michael Cunningham, the example of THE HOURS might have counted for more, but mental disintegration makes a poor organizing principle. She rightly praises Woolf's ability to portray her characters from the inside, but she can do this herself only by fits and starts. And the best books on the post-9/11 mindset, at least so far -- novels like Joseph O'Neill's NETHERLAND and Don DeLillo's FALLING MAN -- approach the topic far more subtly. While I give credit to Elina Hirvonen for tackling painful themes (and the character of the psychotic brother has the ring of personal truth), I would like to see her develop a less scattershot method of handling them.

First, a disclosure: I stopped reading the book on page 155 (out of 180 pages). The Virginia Wolff-like attempt at stream of consciousness writing didn't work. The intentional jumps from real-time event to flashbacks were written without transition causing me confusion and disorientation. The self-indulgent and overwrought focus of the narrator, Anna, about her past and present with Joona, her mentally ill brother, and her family were wrenching, as the front cover book review quote says, but it was all too much of the same thing. A family, and narrator, unable to cope with, and come to terms with, the unreachable son and brother.
Anna's boyfriend, Ian, an American literature professor, in Finland lecturing a class of Anna's, has his own traumatic family history, including the father unable to deal with his Vietnam experience. Ian also has his personal emotional traumas from childhood unresolved, but which come to the surface during his time with Anna.
The connection in the book, the 155 out of 180 pages I read, with the terrible events of 9/11 are cursory for this reader. I wasn't able to see how that day, and the days following, had any relationship with the rest of the story.
I didn't want to deal with Anna, her familial tragedies, nor Ian and his dysfunctional family any more.
I greatly looked forward to reading this book, but, as you can tell, I found little, if any, of what the other reviewers discovered and enjoyed about this pitiful, confusing, narcissistic and tragic story.

This short novel is a heartbreaking, beautifully written story. Every sentence is memorable. I don't even know how to say 'hello' in Finnish but applaud the remarkable translator for making Elina Hirvonen's words touch a place in my heart that remains with me weeks after having read it.

For Anna, remembering the happy and tragic events of her childhood with her mom and dad and her troubled older brother Joona juxtaposed with the reality of unexpected terrorism in New York, makes every memory ache with what we want our lives to be and what we have to deal with.

It's short, touching, sad and overwhelming in its grasp of our precarious lives. You will not put this novel down quickly.

Anna is a young journalist on a work deadline. But instead of working on her article, she sits at a café and reads a Virginia Woolf novel. She is also avoiding her boyfriend Ian, a literature professor, and her mother's text messages, begging her to visit Joona. Mrs. Dalloway brings back bitter memories for Anna, memories she has tried to forget. These memories center on her brother Joona and their father. The father, a religious fanatic, was an abusive man, and Joona now suffers from a mental illness as a result. Calling out to Satan is one of his many troubling behaviors. So, as Anna sits alone at a café with a book, flashbacks of abuse, conversations with Ian and witnessing post-Vietnam war traumatic stress befall her.

All told with dark and edgy undertones, with a backdrop of post-9/11 and the subsequent Iraq invasion, this controversial Finnish novel is literary and heart wrenching. When I Forgot has quite an open anti-American feel that might offend some, but might bring awareness to us from a different perspective. The September 11 disaster didn't just affect us, but the whole world. The stuff centered on WWII, the Vietnam War and the War Against Iraq is nothing compared to the stuff that hits closer to home, like the ones centered on abuse and struggles. Joona is one of the saddest characters recently written. Anna is also quite compelling. Even through the heartaches and unresolved issues, she is able to maintain her spirituality and love for her family, no matter how hard she tries to run away from those things. Virginia Woolf is also a big deal in this book. To the Lighthouse is the only Woolf novel I have read, and not because I wanted to; it was required school reading after all. But this novel has compelled me to read Woolf's work. I've already picked up Orlando, which has quite an interesting premise. All in all, When I Forgot is a dark, beautiful read. Elina Hirvonen (translated from Finnish by a Douglas Robinson) is a great author. And even though this is more of a novella than a novel (only 180 pages long), it is nevertheless substantial enough to be considered the latter. I recommend this if you're in the bargain for something short but meaningful.