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Theories of Forgetting
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.
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.
Each page of the novel is divided in half. Alana’s narrative runs across the top of the page, from back to front, while Hugh’s and his daughter’s tale runs “upside down” across the bottom of the page, 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.
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.
Each page of the novel is divided in half. Alana’s narrative runs across the top of the page, from back to front, while Hugh’s and his daughter’s tale runs “upside down” across the bottom of the page, 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.
- GenresFiction
384 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2014
3 people are currently reading
118 people want to read
About the author
Lance Olsen
51 books117 followersLance Olsen was born in 1956 and received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin (1978, honors), his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop (1980), and his M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) from the University of Virginia.
He is author of eleven novels, one hypertext, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and a textbook about fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Gulf Coast, McSweeney's, and Best American Non-Required Reading.
Olsen is an N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient, and former governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His work has been translated into Italian, Polish, Turkish, Finnish, and Portuguese. He has taught at the University of Idaho, the University of Kentucky, the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, on summer- and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Finland, at various writing conferences, and elsewhere.
Olsen currently teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities.
He is Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review. With his wife, assemblage-artist and filmmaker Andi Olsen, he divides his time between Salt Lake City and the mountains of central Idaho.
He is author of eleven novels, one hypertext, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and a textbook about fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Gulf Coast, McSweeney's, and Best American Non-Required Reading.
Olsen is an N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient, and former governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His work has been translated into Italian, Polish, Turkish, Finnish, and Portuguese. He has taught at the University of Idaho, the University of Kentucky, the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, on summer- and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Finland, at various writing conferences, and elsewhere.
Olsen currently teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities.
He is Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review. With his wife, assemblage-artist and filmmaker Andi Olsen, he divides his time between Salt Lake City and the mountains of central Idaho.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 26, 2015
Lance Olsen is the Anthony Burgess of his time and place, producing novels, short story collections, and non-fiction books at an impressive rate, and like Bugress, has a fondness for restless innovation and risky exploration. Unlike Burgess, Olsen seems to succeed in creating more unique and lasting works, and favours a less frivolous sub-Joycean mode of experiment, embracing technology and breaking down the conventional typesetting of the book. In this novel, much like Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas, the story can be read from either side (two back covers to choose from), and as in that novel, the topic matter is fairly ordinary—a man has a breakdown after the loss of his wife (whose decline is one of the narratives), and a sister comes to terms with her errant brother, Lance Olsen. The protagonists being artists and literary people, this allows for a more-than-liberal splashing of quotations from artists and writers across its pages and margins, and various photos inserted to accompany the downbeat tone. The female narrative is the most engaging for its doomed brevity, the male narrative and marginalia are less impressive and lack coherence, as does the novel on the whole. Otherwise, a risky and worthwhile subversion of the usual. (Lance also has a piece on Raymond Federman in this thing: Verbivoracious Festschrift Volume Three: The Syllabus).
May 23, 2017
I read some Lance Olsen for an internship that included a lot of David Foster Wallace and sections on experimental writing and teaching. I really liked Calendar of Regrets (although I’m not really sure what to make of it–I think that’s kind of the point), and I found Architectures of Reality interesting for all its book recommendations but less helpful on the teaching aspect (since I’ve never taught creative writing).
I knew more or less what I was getting into with this novel, which comes out of a general theory that there are a lot of different ways to read a book rather than simply front to back and left to right. It also comes from the idea that fiction should be more than just entertainment, that maybe there should be some work involved in breaking us out of our typical ideas about the world. In those respects, I’ve never met an Olsen book that didn’t succeed.
In one of three intertwining narratives on loss and memory, Alana suffers from a strange plague called The Frost while she tries to finish a documentary on The Spiral Jetty. In the others, her husband struggles to manage her death with travel and a prescription drug addiction, and her daughter comments on his recovered manuscript in the margins.
The book confronts us with its weirdness right away: both sides look like the typical back of a novel, with a short description, a blurb about the author, and praise from its reviews. There’s no obvious way to begin, and half the text of each inside page is upside down, meaning there’s no obvious way to proceed either. There are any number of ways to approach reading this, but rather than continually rotate the book, I read straight through one narrative, then flipped the novel and read through the second. It was only luck that had me reading Alana’s story first, but I was grateful since it’s chronological (and that may be the only kind of straightforward ‘logical’ here).
I like all the extra “stuff” in Olsen’s novels: the photographs, the handwritten margin notes, the links to video content (although that was sort of painful), the newspaper clippings. It’s always a visual feast to see the way he’s arranged things on the pages, and while there are repetitions and things I’m not sure what to make of (I have a theory about the brackets, but what are the eight dots for?), I have the sense that nothing is accidental, no space wasted. Everything here has a meaning, if only I could interpret it (quite unlike House of Leaves, where any number of columns or lists can be skipped over without consequence).
The thing I like most about Theories of Forgetting is that it’s smart. The book is as difficult to navigate as actual memory is. We like to think we remember in narrative wholes rather than fragments. The truth is that we forget the past, our past selves who eventually feel like strangers, our pain or illness when we’re not in pain or ill. Things look different from a distance, whether that distance is time or space. Life more resembles this jumble of objects and incomplete thoughts, its cross-outs and its side comments, its meaningful and not-meaningful associations, than it does a traditional narrative.
I enjoyed Alana’s perspective a lot more than Hugh’s, even as it eventually breaks down due to illness. Her voice is unique and insightful, and her observations about spirals–found in artwork and nature–are fascinating. (The book itself actually mimics this movement, whether you read it front to back/back to front as I did–that is, in one big spiral–or continually rotate it in lots of smaller spirals.) Olsen also makes some shrewd points about the nature of illness and the running down of the human body over time. It has a truth to it that a lot of illness narratives lack (assuming you can find them at all).
I was less fond of Hugh’s manuscript. His voice is more familiar, edging toward pretentious, and I feel like the drug-haze narrative is a lot more common than Alana’s; I’m not sure what Hugh’s experience is adding to that conversation. I was genuinely surprised to read on the back (the front?) that his being kidnapped by a cult actually happened; I thought it was just a drug hallucination. This section has some interesting things to say on grief and loss–everything in Hugh’s world without Alana is unfamiliar, including himself, and nothing matters enough to try to pin a meaning to it–but I felt like it got overshadowed by the rest of his experiences. This happens quite a lot in the book; there are a lot of interesting ideas in it, but few of them get more than a glancing touch. It never really seems to come together, and it’s possible that it isn’t meant to.
Aila’s marginalia puzzled me even more, since she’s not really reacting to Hugh’s manuscript so much as inserting random quotes and facts from other sources. I had the sense that it was a comment on how difficult it is for educated adults to communicate with each other, particularly when raised by a family that simply does not communicate the way this one does. Rather than attempt to connect emotionally, we default to intellectual commentary. Again, though, this isn’t a particularly new idea, and I’m not sure what Olsen is trying to add to it. It’s difficult to get a sense of Aila as a character, and even more difficult to get a sense of the brother she’s writing to.
There are multiple Infinite Jest references here (as well as a House of Leaves reference, and probably more that I didn’t pick up on), and I appreciate fiction that pays homage to its influences. I’m not sure there is any contemporary innovative fiction that wasn’t influenced by Jest. There’s the band name, The Whining Fantods, and then an entire section Hugh spends with the cult that radiates Wallace, down to its rambling sentences beginning with “and but so.” Even Aila notes an overt Wallace reference, and Olsen’s drugged cult seems to be the opposite of Jest’s A.A. meetings; it’s more Fight Club than Infinite Jest, at least in spirit. The interesting part is that Hugh manages to pull himself out of it (to stop watching The Entertainment, as it were), but sobriety isn’t all that helpful to him. He tries to leave words and memories behind; he tries to leave himself behind by writing in the third person, but the “I” (and Alana) relentlessly breaks through.
This is a fun book to talk about and think about, although I think Calendar of Regrets is a little better (more carefully constructed, more thematically whole). My margin notes are mostly questions, and I always love questions more than answers. It’s also a fairly quick read, and it’s very accessible for something so innovative. Theories of Forgetting isn’t difficult the way overly-written classics are difficult; there’s nothing here that, in itself, is above an average reading level. It’s only in trying to put the pieces together in a meaningful way that it becomes a challenge, but as one of my favorite professors liked to say, “Understanding is overrated.” The odds are good you’ll come away with something from this novel, and I recommend it for fans or newcomers to innovative fiction.
I review regularly at brightbeautifulthings.tumblr.com.
I knew more or less what I was getting into with this novel, which comes out of a general theory that there are a lot of different ways to read a book rather than simply front to back and left to right. It also comes from the idea that fiction should be more than just entertainment, that maybe there should be some work involved in breaking us out of our typical ideas about the world. In those respects, I’ve never met an Olsen book that didn’t succeed.
In one of three intertwining narratives on loss and memory, Alana suffers from a strange plague called The Frost while she tries to finish a documentary on The Spiral Jetty. In the others, her husband struggles to manage her death with travel and a prescription drug addiction, and her daughter comments on his recovered manuscript in the margins.
The book confronts us with its weirdness right away: both sides look like the typical back of a novel, with a short description, a blurb about the author, and praise from its reviews. There’s no obvious way to begin, and half the text of each inside page is upside down, meaning there’s no obvious way to proceed either. There are any number of ways to approach reading this, but rather than continually rotate the book, I read straight through one narrative, then flipped the novel and read through the second. It was only luck that had me reading Alana’s story first, but I was grateful since it’s chronological (and that may be the only kind of straightforward ‘logical’ here).
I like all the extra “stuff” in Olsen’s novels: the photographs, the handwritten margin notes, the links to video content (although that was sort of painful), the newspaper clippings. It’s always a visual feast to see the way he’s arranged things on the pages, and while there are repetitions and things I’m not sure what to make of (I have a theory about the brackets, but what are the eight dots for?), I have the sense that nothing is accidental, no space wasted. Everything here has a meaning, if only I could interpret it (quite unlike House of Leaves, where any number of columns or lists can be skipped over without consequence).
The thing I like most about Theories of Forgetting is that it’s smart. The book is as difficult to navigate as actual memory is. We like to think we remember in narrative wholes rather than fragments. The truth is that we forget the past, our past selves who eventually feel like strangers, our pain or illness when we’re not in pain or ill. Things look different from a distance, whether that distance is time or space. Life more resembles this jumble of objects and incomplete thoughts, its cross-outs and its side comments, its meaningful and not-meaningful associations, than it does a traditional narrative.
I enjoyed Alana’s perspective a lot more than Hugh’s, even as it eventually breaks down due to illness. Her voice is unique and insightful, and her observations about spirals–found in artwork and nature–are fascinating. (The book itself actually mimics this movement, whether you read it front to back/back to front as I did–that is, in one big spiral–or continually rotate it in lots of smaller spirals.) Olsen also makes some shrewd points about the nature of illness and the running down of the human body over time. It has a truth to it that a lot of illness narratives lack (assuming you can find them at all).
I was less fond of Hugh’s manuscript. His voice is more familiar, edging toward pretentious, and I feel like the drug-haze narrative is a lot more common than Alana’s; I’m not sure what Hugh’s experience is adding to that conversation. I was genuinely surprised to read on the back (the front?) that his being kidnapped by a cult actually happened; I thought it was just a drug hallucination. This section has some interesting things to say on grief and loss–everything in Hugh’s world without Alana is unfamiliar, including himself, and nothing matters enough to try to pin a meaning to it–but I felt like it got overshadowed by the rest of his experiences. This happens quite a lot in the book; there are a lot of interesting ideas in it, but few of them get more than a glancing touch. It never really seems to come together, and it’s possible that it isn’t meant to.
Aila’s marginalia puzzled me even more, since she’s not really reacting to Hugh’s manuscript so much as inserting random quotes and facts from other sources. I had the sense that it was a comment on how difficult it is for educated adults to communicate with each other, particularly when raised by a family that simply does not communicate the way this one does. Rather than attempt to connect emotionally, we default to intellectual commentary. Again, though, this isn’t a particularly new idea, and I’m not sure what Olsen is trying to add to it. It’s difficult to get a sense of Aila as a character, and even more difficult to get a sense of the brother she’s writing to.
There are multiple Infinite Jest references here (as well as a House of Leaves reference, and probably more that I didn’t pick up on), and I appreciate fiction that pays homage to its influences. I’m not sure there is any contemporary innovative fiction that wasn’t influenced by Jest. There’s the band name, The Whining Fantods, and then an entire section Hugh spends with the cult that radiates Wallace, down to its rambling sentences beginning with “and but so.” Even Aila notes an overt Wallace reference, and Olsen’s drugged cult seems to be the opposite of Jest’s A.A. meetings; it’s more Fight Club than Infinite Jest, at least in spirit. The interesting part is that Hugh manages to pull himself out of it (to stop watching The Entertainment, as it were), but sobriety isn’t all that helpful to him. He tries to leave words and memories behind; he tries to leave himself behind by writing in the third person, but the “I” (and Alana) relentlessly breaks through.
This is a fun book to talk about and think about, although I think Calendar of Regrets is a little better (more carefully constructed, more thematically whole). My margin notes are mostly questions, and I always love questions more than answers. It’s also a fairly quick read, and it’s very accessible for something so innovative. Theories of Forgetting isn’t difficult the way overly-written classics are difficult; there’s nothing here that, in itself, is above an average reading level. It’s only in trying to put the pieces together in a meaningful way that it becomes a challenge, but as one of my favorite professors liked to say, “Understanding is overrated.” The odds are good you’ll come away with something from this novel, and I recommend it for fans or newcomers to innovative fiction.
I review regularly at brightbeautifulthings.tumblr.com.
May 3, 2015
Striking and beautiful, Theories of Forgetting is satisfying on the sentence by sentence level, on the surface of the heart, but falls apart in trying to bridge its structure.
In one half, a man has lost his wife to an illness, and is himself falling apart, mentally and physically--this is told in third person, but is annotated by the man's daughter, in notes the daughter is writing to her estranged brother. In one half, a woman has contracted a disease, which is new and spreading across the world, causing her to be cold and numb, which she documents in her journal.
In both pieces, there are calls to other things, other ideas, engaging with art and literary theory, engaging with family and frustrations, and it is terribly, terribly smart. Unfortunately, all of these pieces, while well balanced, are never brought to much more than occassionally spinning plates on poles that, with no central structure to hold them together, end up collapsing. It is a noble failure, if you could call it a failure (you shouldn't, you would be wrong--says the reviewer putting those words into your head), but it is beautiful and thoughtful while it lasts.
In one half, a man has lost his wife to an illness, and is himself falling apart, mentally and physically--this is told in third person, but is annotated by the man's daughter, in notes the daughter is writing to her estranged brother. In one half, a woman has contracted a disease, which is new and spreading across the world, causing her to be cold and numb, which she documents in her journal.
In both pieces, there are calls to other things, other ideas, engaging with art and literary theory, engaging with family and frustrations, and it is terribly, terribly smart. Unfortunately, all of these pieces, while well balanced, are never brought to much more than occassionally spinning plates on poles that, with no central structure to hold them together, end up collapsing. It is a noble failure, if you could call it a failure (you shouldn't, you would be wrong--says the reviewer putting those words into your head), but it is beautiful and thoughtful while it lasts.
January 19, 2015
This was another artsy book for class, that used as its gimmick two "books," plus "margin notes" on one of them. The cover is the same but upside down on the front and the back. Reading one way, there is the diary of a woman who is dying of a strange disease. Reading the other way, her husband slowly "disappears" in a haze of drugs and trying to kill himself. These are note spoilers, unless you choose not to read the front and back of the book, which basically outlines this for the reader as well. The margin comments, done in blue ink, are from the couple's daughter, ostensibly writing to her estranged brother. There doesn't seem to be much point to this book, except that life is filled with such utter mundanity that you may as well spend what time you have here forgetting everything. It's not a point of view I choose to take.
March 8, 2020
First reading of Hugh's journal + his daughter's annotations done! For now, I'll give it a 3.5 stars. I really liked it, very touching as a whole; but the last part of the book (which reminded me that of
Die SteppenWolf) was very confusing. Now, let's turn around the book and read his wife's journal, in which many images have been added to accompany the text!
Second reading: updated to a 4 stars. Finishing this books has made me sad.....
Die SteppenWolf) was very confusing. Now, let's turn around the book and read his wife's journal, in which many images have been added to accompany the text!
Second reading: updated to a 4 stars. Finishing this books has made me sad.....
August 10, 2014
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. Perhaps it's because I read it alongside _S._ and _House of Leaves_ and so it just didn't seem as well crafted as those others. The idea and the experimentation here are great, but it just seemed like Olsen was trying to do too much and thus not doing any of it as well as it needed to be done to make the experiment work.
December 17, 2014
engaged w/ it here: http://www.5cense.com/14/396.htm
May 18, 2015
I wanted to like this book. I really did. And while I can appreciate the creative approach to the story, I mostly found it distracting and unsatisfying.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews