Assembling the pieces
In the face of loss, memory is everything — and nothing at all
SAMUEL’S car plowed into a tree at top speed. The road curved to the left, but his grandmother’s old Opel didn’t, and he was dead by the time help arrived.
Was it an accident or was it suicide? What happened before the crash on the last day of 26-year-old Samuel’s life?
In Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s novel “Everything I Don’t Remember,” a writer sets out to answer those questions. He’s ostensibly planning to write a book, though he also has personal reasons for researching Samuel’s story. He interviews neighbors, friends, relatives, Samuel’s roommate, Samuel’s ex-girlfriend, everyone he can find. Through long, detailed conversations, sometimes over coffee, he begins to piece together a shaky, shifting portrait of the dead man.
As with the fatal accident, there are a few known facts about Samuel; the rest is interpretation and conjecture.
He lived in Stockholm and worked for the Migration Board, but the bureaucratic life didn’t really suit him. He loved his grandmother and visited her regularly after her dementia demanded she move into a home. He had an unnerving, guileless charm, a characteristic some people saw as fakeness. And he did strange things — stick his hand into a watermelon, pour a glass of water over his head — just to shake things up, adding memories to what he called the “Experience Bank.”
But no one knows the truth about his death. “So many rumors are going around the neighborhood,” says a man who lived next door to Samuel’s grandmother. “Some people say that Samuel was depressed and had been planning it for a long time. Others say that it was just an accident.”
The most complicated, contradictory images of Samuel come from the three people closest to him. Samuel’s roommate and best friend, Vandad, is obsessed with money and secretly, perhaps subconsciously, wants more than friendship from Samuel. Samuel’s childhood friend, an artist who calls herself Panther, lives in Berlin; she’s the last person he called before he died. And Laide, Samuel’s ex-girlfriend, spent an intense year loving him; she convinced him to turn his grandmother’s old house into a temporary shelter for abused women, which prompted a disaster that unraveled all his relationships.
Khemiri presents Samuel’s story in an unconventional way. Pieces of interviews are layered one over the other, a few paragraphs at a time, and the narration shifts constantly from person to person. Stories overlap, and the truth feels elusive. Impressions, like the narrators, are unreliable. The puzzle-piece structure is disorienting at first, but after a few chapters, the reader begins to fall into the rhythm of changing narrators and stories that volley back and forth in time.
The trio that formed Samuel’s inner circle resent one another, blame one another, contradict one another. But it becomes obvious that, in many ways, they each knew a different Samuel.
“Everything I Don’t Remember,” Khemiri’s fourth novel, won his country’s prestigious August Prize for best fiction when it was published in Swedish last year. This version, a translation by Rachel Willson-Broyles, reads like a novel in its original language; the voices are all unique, conversational and real-seeming. And for a story that revolves around death, it’s remarkably funny; even the characters’ disdain for each other is tinged with humor.
“Some people have a gift,” Vandad says. “They transform everyone else into idiots. They look at people with eyes that make whatever anyone else says fall dead to the ground. Every joke you utter loses life and crash-lands. Laide is one of those people.”
Laide seems to have genuinely loved Samuel, at least for a time: “Maybe because it felt so easy to be with him. Undemanding and simple. … It was like our brains had played music in a former life, they had practiced scales and tuned their neurons in the same key and now that they were finally meeting again they could just jam away, no sheet music necessary.”
But the still jealous Vandad recalls a more awkward beginning for Samuel’s relationship. “Who said that Samuel and Laide’s first date was ‘magical’? Who is spreading the rumor that they were ‘soulmates’?” He recounts the first time his roommate texted Laide, after the two met briefly about a work matter:
“Okay. Okay okay okay,” he called, half happy, half panicked. “I just did it. I pressed ‘send.’ I texted her!” “Who?” “Her. … I said thanks for last time and asked her to contact me if her client needed any more assistance. Best, Samuel, Migration Board.” “You said thanks for last time?” “Yeah, was that weird or something?”
“That’s what you say after you’ve been to a party. Not when you’ve had a random encounter in the parking lot.”
Vandad has never cared much for Panther, Samuel’s childhood friend, either. “Why Panther?” he says, marveling at her nickname. “If there was any animal this person did not resemble, it was a panther. Drowned Turkish hamster, maybe. Kurdish marmot, definitely. Oversized Syrian meerkat, possibly.”
Panther, meanwhile, breaks down nearly every time she answers a question about Samuel. “Do I regret anything?” she says. “Of course I regret some things. Everyone does. Anyone who says they don’t is lying. Everyone walks around with feelings of loss and sadness and shame. It’s perfectly normal.”
And even those who knew him best can’t agree on the cause of Samuel’s car accident.
“I think he was simply driving too fast,” Laide says. “… He probably wanted to see what would happen if he brushed up against death.”
Panther believes it wasn’t an accident at all. “He made up his mind,” she insists. “He was ready. He made the decision.”
And Vandad, seething with anger and envy, blames one person: Laide. “She made him believe that he could trust her and then she betrayed him and he never got over it,” he says. “She killed him.”
The story picks up speed near the end, shifting from speaker to speaker, each offering just a sentence or two. But as the back-and-forth gets sharper, the truth becomes fuzzier. Samuel becomes a patchwork of tender recollections and long explanations, misinterpretations and made-up justifications — stories told by the people who knew him. In the end, their memories, both genuine and false, are all of him that remain.