Forgottenness
2021, Translation-in-Progress Grant Recipient
Forgottenness
«Забуття»
Author: Tanja Maljartschuk
|Translator: Zenia Tompkins
About the project: Published in Ukraine by Old Lion Publishing in 2016, Tanja Maljartcshuk’s Forgottenness («Забуття») was the winner of the BBC Book of the Year Award. This literary, psychological, and historical novel, written in hauntingly sparse and deliberate prose, chronicles the mental and emotional journey of a young Ukrainian woman searching through her nation’s past for footprints to guide her through the present. The narrator, a young author, finds her life spiralling downward through a series of progressively less successful relationships until she is teetering on the verge of psychosis. She discovers unexpected solace and companionship in the unlikely figure of Vyacheslav Lypynsky (1882-1931), an unsung Ukrainian social and political activist of Polish descent, whose life is artfully tied with that of the narrator throughout the book. Thought-provoking digressions concurrently tell the story of multiple generations of the narrator’s family against the historical backdrop of twentieth-century Ukraine. As the narrator grasps at sanity, she simultaneously grasps at aspects of her nation’s history to keep them from slipping into oblivion. Complex in both content and structure, Forgottenness defies a nation’s Soviet-imposed memory of rootlessness by exploring the burden of a collective memory built on fear, obedience, and forgetting.
The book will be published by Liveright, the fiction imprint of W. W. Norton & Company.