Pam Durban

[The Tree of Forgetfulness] is the story of a lynching in South Carolina in 1925. Told from multiple points of view through time after the event, the novel explores mob mentality, how lies and truth become confused, and redemption. Many townspeople were involved in the lynching, but afterward no one is sure exactly who – after all, it was a dark night.

As we move from narrator to narrator, back and forth in time, we see how difficult the idea of “truth” can be. One of the men involved, show more Howard Aimar, claims: “They all knew how murky things could get when what really happened got so tangled up with what should have happened, it was hard to tell them apart, especially when a man mistook what he’d meant to do for what he’d actually done.” The advantage of using several viewpoints is that we get different pieces of the story from each person – and they don’t always mesh.

Durban, in creating people who are not monsters yet who do monstrous things, gives us something to think about. As one of the character tries to understand: “Maybe she wants to piece this story back together, to make it as whole and true as it can be, because she believes that stories can act as antidotes to amnesia and complacency; that telling stories is one way to remember what we’re capable of doing to one another.” show less

The fictionalized story of a triple lynching in Aiken, South Carolina in the 1920s, this is an affecting story of family, memory, legacy, and guilt. I loved how Durban used multiple perspectives and the last days of one man involved as the impetus for the exploration of how a community responds to horrific events. Very well done.

"The Laughing Place" is the antithesis of Chick Lit bestsellers and their smart, piercing wit. It goes deep into painful places and pulls at them like an insistent fingernail at a scab. Durban prods gently at the most cherished human foibles – pride, vanity, grief, and betrayal. She doesn’t laugh so much as look sympathetically on while we squirm at being found out, and I’m not sure if that’s better or worse. It moves slowly and with warmth, deceptively calm as quicksand. It is full show more of ugly truths in clothed in beautiful words, which although a welcome relief from the glaring directness of harsh reality, is no less uncomfortable when taken in and swallowed. It is probably more dangerous for that very reason.
Putting aside the deeper lessons of The Laughing Place, it is at the least full of chokingly moving prose stripped of the annoying intellectual pretense I find in say, Barbara Kingsolver or Alice Sebold. Her voice is gentle, sympathetic, and refreshingly simple as it carries us on a journey of loss, endurance and eventual salvation. I didn’t want to keep reading, but found I could not put it down. show less