Theories of Forgetting
| File:Lance Olsen's novel Theories of Forgetting.jpg | |
| Author | Lance Olsen |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Postmodern novel |
| Publisher | FC2 |
Publication date | February 28, 2014 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 384 |
| ISBN | 1573661791 |
Theories of Forgetting is a postmodern novel by Lance Olsen, published by Fiction Collective Two in 2014.
Plot & Structure
Theories of Forgetting is a novel made up of three intersecting narratives. The first involves the story of a middle-aged video artist, Alana, working on a short experimental video about Robert Smithson's land art Spiral Jetty. The second involves the story of Alana’s husband, Hugh, and his slow disappearance throughout Europe and across Jordan on a trip there both to remember and to forget in the aftermath of Alana’s unexpected death. His vanishing is linked to the Sleeping Beauties, a rising global religious cult that worships barbiturates. The third narrative involves the story of their daughter, Aila, an art critic and conceptual artist living in Berlin, and the marginalia she writes in her father's manuscript she discovers after his disappearance.
Each of these narratives has its own unique form and texture. Alana’s takes the shape of a diary containing photographs, drawings, newspaper clippings, and meditations on Smithson’s oeuvre, with which she becomes increasingly obsessed. Hugh’s is a more conventional third-person narrative, its voice numbed, disoriented, in the wake of his wife's unexpected death. Aila's notes exist only in the margins of Hugh's text.
Each page of the novel is divided in half. One narrative runs across the “top” from “front” to “back,” while the other runs “upside down” across the “bottom” of the page from “back” to “front.” In a sense, then, the novel’s physical structure suggests a spiral.
Theories of Forgetting, then, is interested in the materiality of page as well as in such thematic questions as death and the problem of memory and history.
Reception
Review of Contemporary Fiction wrote "these stories explore the perplexity about ways of knowing and how knowledge is made manifest through storytelling,"[1] while Rain Taxi said Olsen's novel "ultimately reminds us of the ways that art and narrative doggedly navigate that thin line between the drive for order and the deep-seated realization that the universe that greets us each morning has only increased its entropy."[2]
External links
References
- ^ "Calendar of Regrets". Review of Contemporary Fiction. 1 April 2011. Retrieved 7 December 2012.
- ^ "Calendar of Regrets". Rain Taxi. Summer 2011. Retrieved 7 December 2012.