Forgetfulness: A Haunting Literary CIA Thriller of Terrorism and Revenge from Award-Winning Author Ward Just

by Ward Just

Thomas Railles, an American expatriate and former “odd-jobber” for the CIA, is a successful painter living with his beloved wife, Florette, in a small village in the Pyrenees. On an ordinary autumn day, Florette goes for a walk in the hills and is killed by unknown assailants. Was her death simply a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or was it somehow connected to Thomas’s work with the CIA? When French officials detain four Moroccan terrorists and charge them with Florette’s murder, Thomas is invited by his boyhood friend (and former agency handler) Bernhard to witness the interrogation. Thomas's search for answers in this shadow world will lead him to a confrontation that will change him forever.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Mystery, Book Club, Espionage, Novels, France

258 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Ward Just was a war correspondent, novelist, and short story author.

Ward Just graduated from Cranbrook School in 1953. He briefly attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He started his career as a print journalist for the Waukegan (Illinois) News-Sun. He was also a correspondent for Newsweek and The Washington Post from 1959 to 1969, after which he left journalism to write fiction.

His influences include Henry James and Ernest Hemingway. His novel An Unfinished Season was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005. His novel Echo House was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1997. He has twice been a finalist for the O. Henry Award: in 1985 for his short story "About Boston," and again in 1986 for his short story "The Costa Brava, 1959." His fiction is often concerned with the influence of national politics on Americans' personal lives. Much of it is set in Washington, D.C., and foreign countries. Another common theme is the alienation felt by Midwesterners in the East.

Reviews

[shellyindallas · Rating 2 out of 5]

The good news: I finished it.
The bad news: I really shouldn't have.

It's hard to pan a book that is reviewed and received so well. While I was reading this book, and for the most part being bored to tears, I kept thinking "re-read that part, focus more, get into it goddam it! it's supposed to be good." For a long time I was hesitant to give up on this book b/c I didn't want to feel like a failure and a quitter. So I finished. Sort of. Okay, toward the end it's all just more of the same so I skipped a bunch. Fuck it. It's a book. It's not a pet, or a person, or a job. It's a book with a fancy stamp on it. And what do they (the stampers)know anyway? The truth of the matter is the back cover promises more than the pages betwixt the covers delivers. I was misled. It wasn't, as the Atlantic Monthly suggests, "suspense of the highest order." But rather, I would suggest, nonsense of the highest order.

Dear Ward,

Why are you telling me this? Isn't this book supposed to be about some mystery surrounding Florette's death? And Thomas's CIA connections? And don't we find out in the middle of the book her death wasn't much of a mystery, and that he wasn't all that connected? And yet still you go on, and on, and on.

Why?

[Sarah left GR · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy this author's style -- atmospheric and elegant, uncluttered by things like adverbs and quotation marks. An excerpt, describing how one character reads a newspaper:

Facts anchored the world. He had never seen a basketball game in his life, but always consulted the standings of the NBA, the won-lost column, the percentages, and the games-behind, and only then returned to page one and the unstable milieu of reporters' narratives where he had to guess at the life behind the news. What he saw often was the world of his youth, the vast expanse of the Midwest, proper names and place names inspiring buried memories, the strange mnemonics of interior cities: Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis. He thought of these reports as light from distant campfires.

C'mon... unstable milieu of reporters' narratives and the strange mnemonics of interior cities... how can you not love that?

Don't expect a dramatic plot twist or violent climax, just savor the prose.

[Victoria · Rating 1 out of 5]

I do not understand why this book received such raving reviews! To be honest, I had a difficult time getting through it. And I never came to like it, or the main character. Stylistically, it followed a European-type format without using quotation marks, which I found to be particularly annoying. The chapters were overly long, and despite its opening chapter, the plot fell quite secondary to the main character in the book. Comprised mainly of old men, these characters never fostered a connection to me. And the nearly constant stream of consciousness nearly made me unconscious if I opened the book at night. I had high hopes going in, because the premise sounded exciting and interesting, but ultimately I found it to be rather dull.

[Annette · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not really sure how to describe this book - passive, quiet, restrained, maybe? It's a good book, but not at all about vengeance and terrorism as the synopsis suggests. In fact, the backdrop of post-9/11 is wholly irrelevant. I think this book is more about realizing that bad things happen - and that there is often not an answer to the question "Why?"

The characters have a lot of potential, but the author doesn't develop any of them to a deep enough level to be satisfactory to the reader. You want to know more about them, but the author really gives you nothing.

[KP · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was really boring. Although Ward Just may be a good writer, this book had, basically, no plot. So, to me that does NOT show a good writer. His sentences were literary sounding; that was good. The BEST part was the beginning. It is like he had the climax of the book in the beginning, and the resolution lasted the whole rest of the book and went downhill the whole way.

[Scott Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's novels like "Forgetfulness" that make me feel good about getting older. It wouldn't have meant much to me, if anything at all, in my youth. Some things only begin to resonate with time and Just handles these themes beautifully. It is one of my favourite novels by Just. I don't know why he doesn't enjoy higher stature in American letters. He really ought to.

[Al · Rating 3 out of 5]

Billed as an espionage novel, Forgetfulness seemed to me more like an extended, moody inquiry into the life of the protagonist and single major character, Thomas Railles. We meet Thomas as an elderly American living with his French wife in a tiny French village in the foothills of the Pyrenees. In the opening chapter, his wife dies in a mountain hiking accident, but nefarious unknown men (terrorists?), perhaps trying to save her, are also unaccountably involved in her death. The entire book is dedicated to a leisurely combination of recounting Thomas's state of mind and reactions in the period following his wife's death and flashbacks to his life and career as a very successful portrait artist. One constantly expects that Thomas will, any minute now, honor the part of his life story where he served as an occasional, reluctant part-time information stringer for the CIA by leaping into action to avenge his wife's death. But, Mr. Just is on a different mission here; you can decide if you like his choice.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely not one of my favorite Ward Just novels.

[Marguerite Hargreaves · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought-provoking, understated book about Americans and the U.S. after Sept. 11. (Author Ward Just looks prophetic when it comes to the malaise currently infecting the global economy.) Thomas Railles is an expatriate American living in France. He's done work for the CIA over the years and still has ties to friends in the business. But mostly he's a portrait painter. His paintings are discoveries -- of self and others and their respective environments. He's become distanced from the U.S. and its values. He's a man without a country. Once he meets and marries Florette, that changes. But the events of 2001 are inescapable, even in rural France. A boorish man blinded in the World Trade Center attacks happens into their village:
"There seemed nothing of it to discuss usefully except the question of forgiveness, mercy offered to a man living in darkness and hating every second, knowing all the while that those most directly responsible were dead and could not be called to account. ... Grievous injury did not ennoble a man except in special circumstances." Eventually, Ward makes the case that injury doesn't ennoble a country, either.
When his French wife is killed randomly, the bottom drops out of Thomas' world. When it turns out that Moroccan terrorists killed his wife, Thomas revisits his past and, eventually, the U.S. He looks at events from more than one vantage point:
"There was a time Americans stuck together, members of the same tribe. Cut one, the others bleed.
I don't remember that time, Thomas said. When was that? Pearl Harbor?
New York, she said. Right now. This minute. It's beautiful."
"When Russ Conlon professed disgust at the promise of paradise for Muslim suicide bombers, the Englishman smiled and said that people who had nothing must be promised something. And they would believe the promise because God was both great and benevolent. No God would condemn a man to live as wretchedly in the next life as he lived in this one. That would make a hoax of life and of God also. ... Revenge has many forms, would you not agree? Revenge is the animating principle of our world."
I think the latter point of view could be unsettling for readers unused to news and opinion from overseas sources, as is Just's indirect criticism of mercenary "security professionals" enriching themselves in the war on terror.
Thomas meets with his wife's killers:
"He was on a perfect knife's edge of indecision, believing one moment that he never should have left St. Michel du Valcabrere, believing the next that his witness was important. Everything that can be known must be known, or that was the theory. But he was unable to identify the line between witness and voyeur. What he had now was an unfinished portrait, far from a work of art. ... He had not solved the problem of who was owed what or if anyone was owed anything."
He returns to their home, but even the environment seems hostile. Eventually, he moves to the U.S., where he's more at home (though still exiled on an island in Maine) than his security-consultant buddy.
Just's writing is elegant and restrained:
"Not one death or a hundred deaths, silent or noisy deaths, public or private deaths, could bring him consolation. What nonsense to speak of consolation. The dead had consolation for eternity, but the living went on living with the consequences of the lives they had made for themselves, and consolation didn't come into it."
As for the title, Just writes, "Forgetfulness is the old man's friend. Forgetfulness is a dream state."

[Megan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first, in two books that made me question ever wanting to read again. It's not really that the book is so bad--but when you're 118 pages in and still don't care about any of the characters or what is happening to them, it frustrates me beyond belief. And then I find myself not picking up a book for weeks.

[Marvin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Set in France near the Spanish border, where a woman dies while on a hike in the mountains, & some shadowy figures might or might not be responsible for her death. It didn't hold my interest, so I gave up on it.

[NC Weil · Rating 4 out of 5]

This 2006 novel limns the life of artist Thomas Railles, who made his way from small-town Wisconsin to Paris as a young man soon after WWII and never looked back. His two classmates, Russ and Bernhard, join the national security service and sometimes press him into using his talents – making a painting of this or that person for purposes he doesn’t inquire too closely about. The story opens with his wife, hiking in the Pyrenees outside the small French town she and Thomas live in, having a fatal encounter.

I won’t spoil the turns of story, except to say that Florette’s death sets in motion a tumult of memories, acts of vengeance, and the consolations and limits of art to express or heal. Characters have secrets, which make them reclusive or manipulative, and over time those secrets govern the borders of their lives. And the village, perched amid wild mountains, is expressive in its own way, with savage weather and provincial folk. It’s a place a person with a bruising past can hide out, where locals do not pry into one another’s affairs. Thomas with his paints can go where he pleases, part of the fabric of a town that demands nothing.

But Florette is gone, and whether or not he wants revenge, or justice of any kind, what he misses is her. Just is sensitive to the way a late-in-life marriage comforts, with companionship in the context of privacy – and the way attachment changes the path forward, with and then without that partner.

“Forgetfulness leads to –”
“Forgiveness?”
No, not that. Do you think so?”
“No, I don’t. What were you about to say?”
Antoine smiled again. He said, “A lack of focus. A lack, I should say, of zeal.”

Thomas lacks the zeal of Antoine, or Bernhard. He would rather forget. He has a point.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

I get the negative reviews, but for some reason I was really smitten with this one. It does feel like a slow stroll through Delillo country at times, but... honestly Delillo more often than not feels like plan-less freestyling to me, whereas this had a structure and foundation that I quite enjoyed. Even towards the end, where the book both in terms of content and format lapses into jazz, it felt earned and assured. There were also echoes of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books that I found quite compelling, not only with its preoccupation with the arts but also this acute sense of home as a refuge from the wilds of everything that is outside literally and outside of our control. Super glad I stumbled onto this one.

[John W. · Rating 2 out of 5]

The story relates to Thomas Railles, an American former odd jobber for the CIA, now living as an expatriate in a small town in the Pyrenees with his French wife. His wife is murdered by unknown assailants. The story largely takes place after the four assailants are found by Thomas Railles' former intelligence colleagues and recounts the examination of the assailants and Thomas's attempts to address the death of his wife and the assailants themselves and his reaction to them. There is an excellent brief description of Thomas return from the village on foot under a freezing rain which combines his stubbornness in refusing a ride when the storm was threatening, the real danger he faces and his future.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I never quite know what to do with these books. They’re both deeply meaningful and often dry and hard to read. They can very often seem to be about nothing. I both want to read all of Just’s work and then wonder why. The writing beautiful. You can feel the lives of the characters and the pain they endure. It can also feel like not much is going on. This one in particular is less a spy novel than the blurb suggests but the plot includes bureaucrats and some sort of CIA-type characters. It seems more about their lives and the changes in them with the terrorism and spy stuff in the background. But I think that’s true of much of Just’s work. The settings include government but the stories are more about the lives of the characters with political conditions in the background.

[Barry Fulton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning story beautifully written. Thomas, an American artist living in France, grives the death of his wife—and then meets the men responsible for her death. His reflection about and discussions with old friends reveal his sentimentality as does his memories of the music of Billy Holiday and Lester Young.

Ward Just’s mastery imbeds the reader in the head of Thomas where we share his pain and rememberance of his life—his painting and occasional assistance to the intelligence community.

[Linda Franklin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked this book very much...found it because there was some connection to spy stories, but it is much more than that. Very very good writer who paces the story well. Not really that much "spy" to it, but because I love le Carre and Deighton and others I wanted to try. Going on to get more from the library. Just has written many books, not sure I have ever heard of him before reading a review somewhere and getting Forgetfulness.

[Toni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gotta give this one a 5. I think I could reread it right now to get more. And I don’t reread books. The writing is superb. The ideas are important and hard. Is vengeance an admirable goal? How do we survive tragedy? How do we interact with our neighbors and friends after awfulness happens? How do we live our lives and live with the consequences of our actions/choices? Heavy stuff here, surrounded by beautiful writing.

[Theodore Kinni · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that I thought about quitting more than once and then, couldn't put down. It's about how a painter, who plays at low grade spying mostly as lark as a young man, lives with harm he caused and the loss of people he loves, told against the backdrop of the post 9-11 world. No fireworks here and not an easy read, but compelling.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

The plot summary on the back of this book does not match the book. I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I wasn't anticipating suspense, revenge, action. But, I think the author did a good job of developing the character and his feelings as he went through the grieving process.

[jim luce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Are you very introspective book about a very introspective man, a painter and an expatriate you need to get past the first chapter to really have the book grab you and if you do not like introspection Facebook might not be for you but if you enjoy it like I do you will

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite some negative reviews, I enjoyed reading this book as much as I usually enjoy reading Ward Just. Descriptions of the landscape and storms are strong. As is the relationship between husband and wife.

[Louise · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boring and pointless . Regret wasting my time hoping something would happen . It never did.

[Steve Mayer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A meditation on grief, justice, revenge and memory. The wife of Thomas Railles, expat artist, is brutally murdered in the French Pyrenees. What happens when he confronts her killers?

[Erika · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was just a slog. At least it is finally off my shelves.

[Janet · Rating 3 out of 5]

sad, read for book club

[Herbert]

COULDN’T GET PAST FIRST FEW PAGES OF WANDERING.

[Rosanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense at times, but an interesting depiction of spy life, of torture. of politics and personal life.

[Phil · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I could have read a much better book in the amount of time it took me to slog through this rumination on aging in the form of a kinda spy novel.