Staff Pick
A twenty-something-year-old woman wanders the streets of 2010s Paris at night battling insomnia and intergenerational trauma. Her grandfather was a Holocaust survivor but has recently passed, and as she begins the difficult journey of processing that grief she begins to find a deeper understanding of how what he went through continues to affect her and her family and she begins to reconsider how the events of his life lead her to where she is today. This rather moving story is told in a slightly complex but beautiful way as you see both past and present through our protagonist's obsessive point of view. The repetition of her obsessions and hyper-fixations throughout the novel not only serves as a through-line, keeping us grounded in the semi-stream-of-consciousness world of this novel, but also helps create a more personal tie to this character as more is unveiled about her. A surreal but wonderful read that I highly recommend. Recommended By Aster A., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Forgetting is a brief but searing sojourn inside the mind of Alma as she navigates the complexity of the past and future within her identity.
On her nighttime wanderings through a Paris saturdated with cultural and historical meaning, she begins the slow work of grieving for her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, and begins to unravel the ways that his experience continues to reverbrate across generations. The journey, both inward and outward, simple and infinitely varied, brings Alma to reconsider her whole life and the circumstances that led to her very birth.
In Forgetting, Finkelstein sheds new light on the oldest dilemmas, asking: What to do wth the brief time that is given to us?
Review
"Finkelstein's fascinating English-language debut chronicles a 20-something woman grappling with intergenerational trauma in 2010s France...Slim but impactful, this is a must-read." — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
About the Author
Frederika Amalia Finkelstein is a French writer and author of two novels: Forgetting and Survive. Upon its 2014 release in France, Forgetting was met with great critical success and has since been translated into multiple languages.
Isabel Cout is a translator in Montreal, Quebec. Her research concerns literary works by third generation authors (grandchildren of Holocaust survivors) who write about having ambivalent relationships to the traumatic memory they've inherited. This is her first published literary translation.
Christopher Elson has a background in Philosophy and French Studies and holds a doctorate in Contemporary Literature from Université Paris IV-Sorbonne. He is a member of the Joint Faculty of the University of King's College and Dalhousie University. He is currently editor of Dalhousie French Studies and music columnist for the Dalhousie Review. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia with his wife Kate.