It was recently reported by the BBC that Dutch scientists had discovered a pill banishing bad memories. The common heart medicine, a beta-blocker, alters how memories are recalled and has been effective in helping those suffering from traumatic memories. Naturally, ethical concerns were raised about the use of the drug: What if important memories are erased in the process?
Sad recollections along with happy ones are what make us human. Without them, our collective slates would be blank and our stories dull. And dealing with the past is the touchstone of Finnish journalist and filmmaker Elina Hirvonen's excellent and evocative debut novel When I Forgot.
- When I Forgot, by Elina Hirvonen, translated by Douglas Robinson, Tin House, 184 pages, $17.50
"Memory is one of life's burdens that we can do nothing about," thinks Anna Louhiniitty, a young journalist, as she sits in a Helsinki café trying to gather her strength to go visit her brother, Joona, who is in a psychiatric hospital.
It is early spring, a year and a half after the events of 9/11. The Iraq war has recently begun. Over coffee, Anna attempts to read Michael Cunningham's The Hours, with its account of a day in the life of three different women, inspired by Virginia Woolf.
The book is a gift from her professor and now lover, Ian, a visiting lecturer from New York's Columbia University who has been teaching a Woolf seminar at a Finnish university. Early on in the novel, Anna quotes a letter written by Woolf before she walked into the water with her pockets laden with stones: "You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight it any longer, I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work."
Dear, mad Joona, her elder brother whose tracks she has tried to cover since they were children, weighs down Anna. "I knew that Joona had something. Something that made him sit quiet for hours, and then suddenly, in home in daycare or in school, raise his eyes and start talking about Satan," she recalls.
Anna's self-appointed role was to be his protector and "make sure that the day's shadows would fade away and all our lives would have a happy ending." But despite her love for him, she was often among those whom he hurt the most.
As she searches for good memories and recalls the bad ones - when their father beat Joona, the time Joona lit the Christmas tree on fire, the day that he drank drinking fluid from the cleaning lady's cart in the hospital and had to have his stomach pumped before he fled into the streets in his bathrobe - she realizes how much she would like to hang on to hope. Hope that Joona would get better, and hope that she could have "a childhood to reminisce about ... [and]a brother with a real life."
Through Anna, Hirvonen paints a nostalgic portrait of their childhood in the 1970s, a time when Finland was better known for its brightly coloured Marimekko prints and role as a Cold War mediator between East and West than for its current position as the high-tech land of Nokia and top-notch education.
Interspersed with Anna's story is Ian's, as she portrays what it's like to be an American in anti-American Europe post-9/11. She imagines Ian's life, from his early years with a father who went crazy in the Vietnam War to the moment when he sat alone in his flat watching those two planes crashing into the towers.
While 9/11 represents a global loss of innocence and trust, it also mirrors the betrayals both Anna and Ian experienced dealing with the unpredictability and horror of mental illness.
What is most remarkable about this novel, aside from its honest, simple prose and compelling storyline (it's difficult to stop reading), is that Hirvonen maintains a real sense of optimism throughout this meditation on love and war.
When I Forgot was originally published in 2005 by independent Finnish publishing house Avain and short-listed for the prestigious Finlandia Prize. Since then, the book has been translated into several languages, including English. It has garnered stellar reviews, including a glowing review on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, which is virtually unprecedented for a debut novel in translation.
No other Finnish novel in recent history has achieved such international success. Elina Hirvonen is a bright new literary light and a writer to watch.
Katja Pantzar grew up in Canada and worked in the book-publishing industry for many years. These days, she is a magazine writer and editor based in Helsinki.