When I Forgot

Elina Hirvonen’s novel When I Forgot, is a striking portrayal of two adults dealing with the mental illness of close family members. The reader is drawn into the lives of Ian and Anna, two Finnish writers. Hirvonen explores the scars left by each character’s experience with mental illness. She demonstrates the difficulty of living one’s own life successfully while dealing with a kind of survivor’s guilt at leaving behind the ill family member. We learn early on that Anna’s brother, Joona, is a paranoid schizophrenic, though the author never explicitly names his illness. Anna’s boyfriend and professor, Ian, struggles with his father’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Alcoholism, as well. Ultimately, Hirvonen leaves the show more reader with hopefulness that Ian and Anna will be able to live their live healthfully and happily despite their brushes with illness. Overall the novel is well written and engaging. However, Hirvonen’s sub-story surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attacks seems out of place. I think it detracts from the main conflict and is not thoroughly developed enough to bring any great meaning to the novel or to the event itself. show less

An eye-opening generational viewpoint from the children of the baby-boomers. Deals with precise clarity and incisive insight with the awfulness of ordinary, everyday lives, the hurt and damage that so many live through. it offers a particular insight into the experience of being close (too close) to someone whose reality is just slightly skewiff of everyone else's, and shows how that is rational, in its own terms, as well as self-destructive and unbearably painful to watch from outside. And yet this book is wonderfully uplifting in places. i don't know how the author did that and I look foward to reading more from her.

'memory is one of life's burdens that we can do nothing about'
By sally tarbox on 8 April 2012
Format: Paperback
I read this in one sitting; it's the terribly sad story of Elena and her brother, Joona, who is in a Helsinki mental hospital. The accounts of his life are punctuated by happy family recollections - and darker ones. Did their father's brutality cause his son's emotional state?
Elena intersperses her narrative with memories of her own lonely childhood; her partner, American lecturer Ian, has his own demons too as a bullied youth with a father damaged by Vietnam.
A deeply moving book, to which the little flashes of happy memory give added poignancy.

Beautifully written: the feelings of a child and the whole atmosphere of childhood became back to me as I was living it again, even though my childhood was "normal". Hirvonen clearly has ability to catch the universality of childhood traumas: how small they might be, everyone carries them through their lives.

Connections to a certain time (911 and other clues) seems stiff at times, although I could see the point in it. Also the "litterature-student-falling-in-love-and-what-problems-it-causes" -theme is just overly-used in Finnish 21st century litterature (by around 30-year-old writers at least) and feels like an easy way to deliver the main message.

Easy to forget "When I Forgot." It's about a woman's fear of confronting her brother in a hospital, but that imaginative absence is not imagined in an especially painful or affecting way.

When I forgot is a story about a young journalist living around the time of the world trade center attacks. Throughout the story she retells events of her past involving her family and her mentally ill brother while also reaching out to her professor Ian and allowing him to open up and share the hard truth about his past involving his father. I found myself drawn to this book from the first page all the way to the last page and once I started reading it I was unable to put it down. I feel that Elina Hirvonen did an amazing job telling Anna’s story. It was a little bit confusing trying to differentiate between Ian’s life and Anna’s life but after the first few chapters it became easier. I feel that even with the sadness that the show more story revolves around Elina did a good job of keeping the book from getting too depressing. I felt it was a very good book and I will be sure to recommend it to all my friends. show less

3.5
I liked this book, it was a really good look into the past and how it affects us, the memories which stay with us.
I liked the way the story was told, weaving together different stories all from one narrator.

Full review on my blog http://www.thebooktower.webs.com