FORGETTING

A walk through Paris in the early hours of the morning reveals the rich, complex interiority of Finkelstein’s protagonist.

Alma is tormented by the Holocaust; she’s obsessed with technology, Coke and Pepsi, and Daft Punk’s “One More Time.” She’s somewhere between “twenty and twenty-five years old,” an insomniac, and alone in Paris. As night bleeds into morning, she wanders the empty streets, ruminating upon the life of her grandfather—a Polish Holocaust survivor—as well as her own childhood. Finkelstein pays little attention to Alma’s surroundings or visual description, instead ensconcing the reader directly inside Alma’s candid, yet labyrinthine, mind. Time does not occur linearly—indeed it seems, at times, almost to collapse. Alma weaves in and out of memories, revisiting and retelling some narratives, often with changes. Self-conscious, almost metafictional, she acknowledges this erratic storytelling: “So I do what I want with time: I go back, I press pause, I fast-forward whenever I want, as though I were indestructible when inside my mind.” As the novel progresses, Alma begins to appear less trustworthy, or perhaps less rationally level-headed; her brother, whose apartment she’s walking toward in the middle of the night, moved away to Los Angeles some years prior. She shares the unsettling story of killing her own childhood dog, and describes in detail burying his body in the forest yet also somehow throwing it in the dumpster behind her house. These inconsistencies skillfully deny the reader access to Alma’s true character, despite having proximity to her thoughts. As the day carries on, and Alma’s sleep deprivation intensifies, she visits a horse racetrack; the novel culminates in a maddening, almost murky collapse.

A brilliant, peculiar confrontation with genealogy and inheritance.