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Getting Past the Past
by Lewis Hyde
"One of our true superstars of nonfiction" (David Foster Wallace), Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift and Trickster Makes This World, offers a playful and inspiring defense of forgetfulness by exploring the healing effect it can have on the human psyche.
We live in a culture that prizes memory―how much we can store, the quality of what's preserved, how we might better document and retain the moments of our life while fighting off the nightmare of losing all that we have experienced. But what if forgetfulness were seen not as something to fear―be it in the form of illness or simple absentmindedness―but rather as a blessing, a balm, a path to peace and rebirth?
A Primer for Forgetting is a remarkable experiment in scholarship, autobiography, and social criticism by the author of the classics The Gift and Trickster Makes This World. It forges a new vision of forgetfulness by assembling fragments of art and writing from the ancient world to the modern, weighing the potential boons forgetfulness might offer the present moment as a creative and political force. It also turns inward, using the author's own life and memory as a canvas upon which to extol the virtues of a concept too long taken as an evil.
Drawing material from Hesiod to Jorge Luis Borges to Elizabeth Bishop to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, from myths and legends to very real and recent traumas both personal and historical, A Primer for Forgetting is a unique and remarkable synthesis that only Lewis Hyde could have produced.
"An eclectic and insightful miscellany of playful, spirited, provocative reflections." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Poet-essayist Hyde celebrates forgetting as a force for creative potency, personal growth, and social justice, and in doing so reminds us of his talent for intellectual synthesis and his restless, contrarian spirit." - Booklist (starred review)
"An elegant exercise in philosophy and form, Hyde's meditation on forgetting as an act of clarity offers stimulating contemplation of the odd paradox that 'memory and oblivion...cannot function unless they work together.'" - Publishers Weekly
"The sequence of Lewis Hyde's brilliant cultural interventions here reaches a new height, but also a new level of intimacy and compassion. The book feels not so much written as 'unforgotten' onto the page, out of our collective desire to rescue the world." - Jonathan Lethem, author of The Feral Detective
"Compounding and crystalline, penetrating and multifaceted, these collected musings by Lewis Hyde, one of our country's greatest public thinkers, on one of both public and private life's most formidable conundrums: what to remember and what to forget, how why and when to make room for the future by authentically honoring and incorporating the past ... but then letting go and moving on." - Lawrence Weschler, author of A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers
This information about A Primer for Forgetting was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lewis Hyde is the author of Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art and The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, as well as a book of poems, This Error Is the Sign of Love.
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