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    Everything I Don't Remember: A Novel
    Everything I Don't Remember: A Novel
    Everything I Don't Remember: A Novel
    Audiobook7 hours

    Everything I Don't Remember: A Novel

    Written by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

    Narrated by Jack Hawkins

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    A 2016 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, as Chosen by Joyce Carol Oates

    Winner of the August Prize, Sweden’s most prestigious literary honor, and from one of Sweden’s most celebrated and famous young writers, an innovative and gripping murder mystery that reads like a combination reminiscent of Herman Koch’s The Dinner, Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, and the hit podcast Serial.

    A young man named Samuel dies in a horrible car crash. Was it an accident or was it suicide? To answer that question, an unnamed writer with an agenda of his own sets out to map Samuel’s last day alive. Through conversations with friends, relatives, and neighbors, a portrait of Samuel emerges: the loving grandchild, the reluctant bureaucrat, the loyal friend, the contrived poseur—the young man who did everything for his girlfriend Laide and shared everything with his best friend Vandad. Until he lost touch with them both.

    By piecing together an exhilarating narrative puzzle, we follow Samuel from the first day he encounters the towering Vandad to when they become roommates. We meet Panther, Samuel’s self-involved childhood friend whose move to Berlin indirectly cues the beginning of Samuel’s search for the meaning of love—which in turn leads Samuel to Laide. Soon, Samuel’s relationship with Laide leads to a chasm in his friendship with Vandad, and it isn’t long before the lines between loyalty and betrayal, protection, and peril get blurred irrevocably.

    Told with Khemiri’s characteristic stylistic ingenuity, this is an emotional roller coaster ride of a book that challenges us to see ourselves—and our relationships to the closest people in our lives—in new and sometimes shocking ways. Everything I Don’t Remember is “a very original tour de force that still vibrated in my mind long after I had read the last page” (Herman Koch, New York Times bestselling author).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateAug 2, 2016
    ISBN9781508222521
    Author

    Jonas Hassen Khemiri

    Jonas Hassen Khemiri is one of the most important writers of his generation. He has written four acclaimed novels and one collection of short stories, essays and plays. Khemiri is also a celebrated playwright whose work has been performed on stages around the world and who received an Obie Award in 2011 for his Off-Broadway play Invasion!. He lives in Stockholm.

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    Reviews for Everything I Don't Remember

    3.5/5

    63 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      3.89 stars. Unique way of writing. Slow reveal of what happened. More style points than story/plot points.
    • 5/5
      Memory MysteryReview of the Washington Square Press paperback (2018) translated from the Swedish original "Allt jag inte minns" (2015)Everything I Don’t Remember is a challenging read due to the manner of its presentation by a fictional version of the author Khemiri himself. He is investigating the apparent suicide of a 24-year-old named Samuel by questioning an ex-roommate Vandad, an ex-girlfriend Laide, an artist friend nick-named Panther, Samuel’s mother and grandmother, a neighbour of the grandmother, caregivers at the grandmother’s nursing home, etc. Each chapter toggles between two interviews in which the subjects are mostly not identified. You have to determine who is speaking through the various contexts and references. These are usually fairly easy to determine, but it is a regular characteristic throughout the novel which never relents. The reader has to be on their toes constantly, so to speak. Most novels take some time to introduce characters in the early stages after which the reader can relax into hearing the balance of the story without too much extra thought. Everything… requires you to constantly pay careful attention. This may or may not be to everyone’s taste.The downside to this is that despite the extra attention required, the ending is still ambiguous, so some readers may feel let down by that. Even though I reread some sections, I still couldn’t be sure whether I hadn’t missed anything or whether the so-called “mystery” was ever solved. The book’s synopsis for this WSB paperback edition erroneously describes it as a “murder mystery”, but I never had the sense that anything criminal was involved in Samuel’s death. The point of it is that memory and the retelling of experiences will always be faulty and/or self-serving. An attempt to define or capture the story of any person will be subject to these human faults in all of the family and friends being asked to provide their side of the story. If you can accept those terms for this experience you will enjoy this novel as much as I did. It is certainly one that would be worth a complete reread in the future in order to see whether further clues or insights will appear.
    • 3/5
      3.5 stars. The unusual narrative structure is wonderful. This book really drives home that everyone remembers one particular thing completely different than someone else who was there. We have a conversation. There's what was said, there's what I thought I said, they're a what you thought you said, what I thought you said and what you thought I said. Not to mention the other assumptions, judgments and conclusions reached before the moment shared is over. It makes you wonder: when everyone had their own perspective, how do you define truth? What are the facts, if any?

      I do wish the ending wasn't so open ended.

      And who totally didn't catch on to Vandad's feelings from way early in the book? Crazy grandma is a keen observer.
    • 5/5
      Memory is strange. In this novel people seem to be remembering their friend Samuel, who died in a car accident. But are their memories true? Samuel claimed he had a terrible memory, but did he understand just how selective memory is? The narrator is a writer interviewing Samuel's friends and family. How does he chose which memories to share? I really enjoyed this book.
    • 2/5
      When Samuel dies in a car crash, an unidentified writer goes in search of the truth behind his death by interviewing his friends and family. Was Samuel’s death an accident or was it suicide? We are given Samuel’s story through the writer’s interviews with Samuel’s mother, his roommate, his childhood friend and his girlfriend as they flash backwards and forwards through time. The mother was a flighty character who was very uncooperative and did very little to forward Samuel’s story. The roommate, Vandad is an ex-thug who decided to get an honest job once he became friends with Samuel. The childhood friend, Panther is a wild-child bohemian artist. The girlfriend, Laide is a very unlikeable and pretentious Swedish-Arabic interpreter and activist, whose only redeeming quality is that she tries to help abused women. Each of the characters reveal more about Samuel from their own selfish perspectives, making it seem very unlikely that we will ever know the real Samuel. Everything I Don’t Remember is billed as a murder mystery in the book blurb. It really doesn’t hit the mark. I would say it simply falls under literary fiction. It’s a rather bland tale that seems to have been turned into a puzzle for some unknown reason. The unveiling at the end was more about the writer himself than Samuel. I wasn’t invested in the writer so that mattered very little to me. Perhaps it was the very ordinariness of the characters that made this such a highly rated book. I didn’t care for or about any of them. In this case I’m convinced that it was the structural style, the political activism element and the subject of abused women that made this the winner of the August Prize in Sweden. Personally, I wasn’t satisfied with this book. It left me feeling like there should have been more to it. However, this wouldn’t be the first time I haven’t cared for a highly rated book (i.e. Gone Girl really gave me the heebie-jeebies). If you want to read something that has an unusual narrative structure, this may be a good read for you. I want to thank the publisher (Atria Book) for providing me with the ARC through NetGalley for an honest review.
    • 4/5
      Everything I Don't Remember won the August prize for best Swedish fiction book of the year in 2015. Generally, the fact that it was awarded a prize would be a clear indicator that it won't be a book for me. Not so in this instance. I can actually for once understand why this book won an award.Everything I don't remember is about Samuel who died in a horrific car crash. Was it an accident? Was it suicide? An unnamed writer sets out to reconstruct Samuel's last day and learns a lot about the young man through conversations with his imposing friend and roommate, Vandad, his ex-girlfriend, Laide, his arty childhood friend, Panther, as well as Samuel's mother and grandmother who has dementia.If you prefer a traditional linear narrative and have all questions answered at the end, this may be difficult and ultimately unsatisfactory reading. It is ambiguous and in the end, some things are left to your own interpretation. It needs concentration as it feels like putting together a puzzle. It's very innovatively structured with small bits of dialogue without any introduction of the speaker, the perspectives change back and forth, and the timeline switches. Sounds very confusing, but I found it really easy to follow once I got past the first couple of pages. The characters are portrayed really convincingly and the atmosphere is captured extremely well. Laide is a Swedish - Arabic interpreter who is passionate about helping women and supporting asylum seekers. Samuel whose father is North African works for the migration board. Current and authentic, part of the book conveys the experience of immigrants in Sweden (though it could equally be set elsewhere). But the main focus is on how memories relate to reality. The memories of Samuel's friends show clearly that there is no objective truth and that all narrators are unreliable. It's also a very touching story about the definition of love, it's quite a painful story about grief and about making the most of the time you have.I really enjoyed reading this. It all felt very realistic and it was easy for me to become invested in the characters although their lives were basically downright depressing but I was keen on putting the puzzle together and it was worth it in the end.This won't be for everyone, I'm sure, but if you are open to a different reading experience with a story that is topical as well as poignant, this is worthwhile picking up.Many thanks to Atria Books for my ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review.