WHEN I FORGOT by Elina Hirvonen (Tin House), 180 pages, $17.50 paper. Rating: NNNN
In Finnish writer Elina Hirvonen’s universe, the psyche is a fragile thing. When Anna and Ian meet, their common experience with mental illness in their families – and the overwhelming guilt they both feel about it – immediately connects them.
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Her brother Joona easily swings from rage to despair, setting fire to whatever’s disturbing him, doing violence to himself and others. Ian’s father is a traumatized Vietnam veteran. Both are in mental institutions.
Flipping from past to present in both of their lives, Hirvonen slowly gives us insight into why Anna and Ian have such a hard time in the world. It’s a gripping story, told in Hirvonen’s beautifully spare and poetic prose.
Though the text is personal, there is plenty of political subtext as well. The novel sometimes plays out as a meditation on post-9/11 desperation, as Anna and Ian, now both living in Helsinki, try to find something resembling a reasonable response to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Don’t be put off by the fact that this is not exactly a comedy. Some of this year’s best books are tragic – Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared, for example, or Anne Michaels’s The Winter Vault. Though When I Forgot is not quite in their class, it is, like them, terribly sad but also absolutely beautiful.
Hirvonen joins the Getting It Done panel with Anne DeGrace, Tessa McWatt and Lisa Moore on October 30, and reads with Anne DeGrace, Olive Senior and Mary Tilberg on October 31.