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“
Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting is a remarkably fugue-like
ode to the intricacies of memory. Offering two intersecting stories about
illness, loss, and forgetting, with annotations, this is an extremely smart
and moving book about how our lives wind snail-like around one another as
they risk flindering away into absence or death.
”
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— Brian Evenson, author of Immobility
and Dark Property
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Theories of Forgetting is concerned with how words matter, the materiality
of the page, and how a literary work might react against mass reproduction and textual
disembodiment in the digital age—right from its use of two back covers (one
“upside down” and one “right-side up”) that allow the reader
to choose which of the novel’s two narratives to privilege.
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Theories of Forgetting is a narrative in three parts. The first is the
story of Alana, a filmmaker struggling to complete a short documentary about Robert
Smithson’s famous earthwork, The Spiral Jetty, located where the
Great Salt Lake meets the desert. Alana falls victim to a pandemic called The Frost,
whose symptoms include an increasing sensation of coldness and growing amnesia.
The second involves Alana’s husband, Hugh, owner of a rare-and-used bookstore
in Salt Lake City, and his slow disappearance across Jordan while on a trip both
to remember and to forget Alana’s death. The third involves marginalia added
to Hugh’s section by his daughter, Aila, an art critic living in Berlin. Aila
discovers a manuscript by her father after his disappearance and tries to make sense
of it by means of a one-sided “dialogue” with her brother, Lance.
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Each page of the novel is divided in half. Alana’s narrative runs across the
“top” from “back” to “front,” while Hugh’s
and his daughter’s tale runs “upside down” across the “bottom”
from “front” to “back.” How a reader initially happens to
pick up Theories of Forgetting determines which narrative is read first,
and thereby establishing the reader’s meaning-making of the novel.
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—Descriptions from the publisher’s catalog
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We are delighted to feature in this issue...
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:: an excerpt ::
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“For all the unsettling, lyrical beauty of these three overlapping stories,
it is impossible to deny that the form of Theories of Forgetting acts as
one of its main, if not the main, characters...
“...It moves and makes us move. It makes demands both physically and
intellectually. Perhaps most importantly, it affirms the materiality of the book
at a time when the numbers of digital publications are surging...”
—From the review by Michael McLane,
On Being and Maintaining the Ephemeral
(reprinted in this issue)
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←
:see also:
Amazon.com
Video: Olsen lectures on his novel
at the American Academy in Berlin
A.
Olsen’s experimental short video,
Theories of Forgetting,
deploys Smithson’s concept
of “entropology”
:: www.lanceolsen.com ::
the innovative website
where you can learn more
about
Olsen and his work
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:weivretni fo tnirper
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“
One is tempted to call him Lance Armstrong—if for nothing more than
his turbo-charged prose, lightning fast intellect, and an ability
to delay the truth.
”
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—The American Academy in Berlin
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