Two tales of exile intertwined into a profound double portrait, Forgottenness painstakingly traces parallels between the historical and the contemporary, between the collective and the individual, between the histories of two people born on the same day, a century apart. The narrator, a writer grappling with her growing anxiety and obsessive thoughts, becomes fixated on Viacheslav Lypynskyi (1882-1931), a once significant figure in the struggle for Ukrainian independence who has since fallen into oblivion, into the gaping mouth of Time. As she plunges into her nation’s history to come to terms with her own, we slowly uncover the complex relationship between time, memory and identity to confront the question – what does it mean to remember?
Binding: Paperback / softback