Forgetting Things Present

You fidget around, holding this book in your hands, as if in an uncomfortable easy chair, turning it first this way, then that—two back covers? The text going left to right and right to left? What’s going on? Is it a misprinted copy? That it isn’t, but it is one more way to tell a story the indefatigable explorer of narration techniques Lance Olsen has conjured up for us with which to delight our souls and stimulate our minds. It is a book about the decay of the present in a person’s mind and at the same time one about how the way you read a book affects the story that it tells. You read it one way, and you have one tale; you read it the other way, and you have another. Of course, you can reread the book the other way around and will have another pair of tales, but they will be different from the two preceding ones. You can’t read the same book twice.

Theories of Forgetting consists of three related stories—a series of notes in the form of a diary by middle-aged film-maker Alana working on a short documentary about Robert Smithson’s famous earthwork in The Great Salt Lake, Spiral Jetty (1970), while struggling with a disease she has contracted called The Frost; a manuscript by her husband Hugh, a book store owner in Salt Lake City who has disappeared while on a trip to Jordan, in the form of a third person narration about the trip he is taking; and a series of comments (“marginalia”) by his daughter Aila, an art critic living in Berlin, scribbled on the manuscript pages, addressed to her estranged brother Lance. (Lance Olsen is billed as “the editor” in the book, so ostensibly it is he who is the brother in question and we should be grateful to him for having put the three manuscripts together and made them available for us to read and enjoy.)

In addition to the notes on Smithson’s biography and Spiral Jetty, Alana’s account contains comments on her life with her husband and observations on the state of her gradually deteriorating health. The Frost is a pandemic of a new and poorly understood disease and its effects; in addition to being described by Alana, it is illustrated by the progressive deterioration of her cognitive and physical abilities—memory, thinking, and typing skills; the text grows gradually more and more peppered with typing errors, both erasures and misspellings, which with time take on the form of puns similarly to the way this happens in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939). The ultimate fading away of the text attests to Alana’s having died.

Hugh’s story—his manuscript—is a narration in which he refers to himself as “the man.” It appears to be written after the death of Alana and is a dovetailing of his memories of their life together with a description of the trip he is taking first to and then through Jordan, where he plans to explore archeological sites, including the famous Petra. Early in his trip he falls in with members of a global religious cult called The Sleeping Beauties whoworship barbiturates. As was the case with Alana’s account, the text fades away at the end, but this time we don’t know what has happened to its author; it is likely he has joined the cult and has chosen an easy and pleasant way to forget.

Aila’s text is a mixture of, sometimes, bitter thoughts and, at other times, sad comments on her and her brother’s life with their parents interspersed with metaliterary observations, including poignant quotations from Derrida and Baudrillard. They are printed in blue script looking like nervous handwriting over her father’s manuscript, at times obscuring it so as to be illegible, and constitute both a stylistically and topically refreshing companion to the two main narratives.

In Theories of Forgetting, Olsen tries to illustrate through the...