Forgottenness

Reviews / Votes

"Resurrection is the great theme of Forgottenness. Maljartschuk never uses the word, but reading between the lines, we understand that the exhuming of memory is meant to be a miracle . . . the novel itself pushes back against despair, simply by virtue of existing . . . haunted and haunting." -- Judith Shulevitz - The Atlantic "[A] cryptic, haunting novel meant to be read in this moment . . . Ukraine has been fought over for generations, if not centuries. Forgottenness aims to get at the soul of this struggle." -- Martha Anne Toll - NPR "A landmark translation . . . Forgottenness shares a way to read itself and also to read Ukraine's latest fight for survival. Maljartschuk personifies the statewide struggle against oblivion in the individual struggle to accept the things you can't change while refusing to accept the things you can." -- Johannes Lichtman - Foreign Policy "Maljartschuk's novel succeeds because she defies this expectation: her narrative refuses to indulge in the easy, appealing desire for a triumphalist future, for a future from which nothing has been erased and no one has been lost . . . Maljartschuk's novel is a reminder that although everything will ultimately be lost to time, swallowed up by what she calls the 'blue whale' of oblivion, one has a duty to slow down this process for as long as possible. Being 'responsible for memory', even in the face of its destruction, is a requirement for a dignified life." -- Linda Kinstler - New Statesman "This tale of two alienated figures in their own time features evocative metaphors aplenty-and a broader meditation on time, memory, and history. The juxtaposition of a historical narrative with narration in the present day never feels overly mannered, and the result is a thoughtful illumination of both an underdocumented period in history and its effects in the present." -- Tobias Carroll - Words Without Borders "Captivating . . . On a subconscious level, the narrator contends with the horrors endured by her family during Ukraine's centuries-long fight to maintain its history, language, and culture . . . Forgottenness is part of a larger and ongoing trend in contemporary Ukrainian literature where authors are looking to the past in an effort to better understand the present." -- Kate Tsurkan - Kyiv Independent "Originally published in 2016 in Ukrainian, this translation, in light of current events in the country, offers a wider international audience access to Ukrainian voices." -- Booklist "[R]esonant . . . Maljartschuk fruitfully explores themes of erasure and remembrance to meditate on what survives the onslaught of time." -- Publishers Weekly "An impressively sincere self-inquiry about identity." -- Jury of the Usedom Prize, led by Olga Tokarczuk "It's no coincidence that time and memory are the big topic today, feeding off the anxieties of the world. Tanja Maljartschuk's novel is about the giant blue whale of time swallowing everything living on its way. What she is interested in is not even disappearance but tracelessness. Both personal and political, this book rages against time and oblivion as all true literature does." -- Georgi Gospodinov, author of Time Shelter (International Booker Prize 2023) "A novel that dares and wins." -- Taz [Germany]