Remembered, Misremembered, Edited, Full of Gaps

Seán Hewitt's reading list on memory

When I was in Galway for my writing residency earlier this year, a bookseller at Charlie Byrne’s recommended Seán Hewitt’s Tongues of Fire, a poetry collection that I ate up while these rainy mountains towered over the lake outside. The poems in the collection vibrated with the life of nature, sex, death, and grief.

Open, Heaven, Hewitt’s debut novel, is a book that Kaveh Akbar says “blisses with the bright verdure of youth—blackbirds and blossoming hedges, wet hands held tight under buttery starlight.” Set at the turn of the century in a small village in northern England, the novel unspools the exhilaration, terror, and feeling of falling in love, the pull of charisma, and the ache of familial longing.

Hewitt shared with Referential his reading list of books that excavate memory in evocative ways.

Photo, Stuart Simpson, Penguin RandomHouse

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Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time, trans. Bela Shayevich

In a polyphonic hymn to memory, Svetlana Alexievich collects the stories of people who experienced the fall of the Soviet Union. The book hardly has Alexievich’s voice at all: instead, she acts as the quiet presence, the listening ear, the conductor for a whole choir of voices who recall everything from everyday details to heart-rending and life-changing stories of joy, loss, violence, and resilience. Most of all, this book, as a vast feat of collective memory, gives a sense of the human cost of political upheaval, and the ways people overcome, overthrow, and persist in the world.

Erwin Mortier, Stammered Songbook: A Mother’s Book of Hours, trans. Paul Vincent

This is one of the most brilliant books I’ve read. In accumulating fragments and scenes, Erwin Mortier pieces together the story of his mother’s dementia, from the small forgettings to the larger dissolution of a woman whose humanity brims from the page. Heartbreaking and truly extraordinary, this is a book about time, language, and the way memory can become a world we both inhabit and are lost to. It is poetic and so well-observed that each page has something to take your breath away, to change the way you see the world.

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

With a reserved, thoroughly unreliable narrator, The Remains of the Day is the sort of book that swells with a sense of loss, missed opportunities, the damage of the class system and of not being true. As our narrator, Stevens, remembers his life as a butler, we gradually become aware of what he is not telling us, or what he does not dare to remember: his complicity in emergent Nazism, his love for the housekeeper, Miss Kenton. I once watched an interview with Ishiguro where he spoke about the way we are all ‘butlers’ in our lives: deferring to higher powers, setting ourselves aside in service of some abstraction or some reality. By the time you reach the conclusion, the whole, intimately-written sense of loss, of abandoned agency, wells up through the pages.

L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

This is a book that completed up-ended me when I first read it as a teenager. I think I bought it second-hand, and still have the copy, with its green hardback binding. Leo, now an older man, finds a diary that he kept when he was young, and begins to read it, and gradually the story of one hot summer at the turn of the 20^th century emerges—remembered, misremembered, edited, full of gaps. The young Leo has an over-active imagination and an urge for order, and when he goes to stay at his friend’s country estate, Brandham Hall, he becomes infatuated with his friend’s older sister, Marian. He imagines all the people at the Hall as members of the Zodiac, with Marian as Virgo, the Virgin. But as Marian begins to ask him to pass messages to a farmer, Ted, who lives nearby, we become aware that they are conducting an affair, and that Leo is the “go-between.” As his idealised world begins to corrupt before his eyes, this coming-of-age novel simmers with the heat and liquidity of youth. It is a perfect book.

Han Kang, We Do Not Part, trans. E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris

This is the most recent book I’ve read, but from the opening pages I knew it was a special piece of work. When Kyungha gets a message from her old friend, Inseon, to say that she has been taken to hospital, a surreal and sometimes startling real narrative churns into life. Amid a snowy landscape, interspersed with dreams and nightmares, Kyungha travels to Jeju Island, where her friend’s bird is alone in the house, and over the course of the novel the island’s memory, Inseon’s memory, and Kyungha’s memory begin to interwine, spinning themselves into a rich, haunting picture of the island’s history. The writing is precise and glinting, and the way the story is structured brings so much of the richness of memory’s persistence, its unreliability, and its testimony, to the fore. A beautiful and haunting book.

Shop Seán’s reading list, order Open, Heaven, and read more of Hewitt’s work here.

Reference Section

• Currently reading: Stag Dance by Torrey Peters. The first story in this collection was so refreshing—the deeper you get into her characters, the more complex and layered their motivations become.

• Last week, I caught up with Elizabeth Kott about Too Niche. She just wrapped up her wedding guides, and you can read more here.

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