“Everything I Don’t Remember” by Jonas Hassen Khemiri (post 2): Award-winning Swedish bestseller with unacknowledged multiple personality

This novel is “Winner of the August Prize, Sweden’s Most Prestigious Literary Honor” (front cover). The prize (1) is named after August Strindberg, discussed in past posts (search “Strindberg”).

The novel builds a case—memory gaps and alternate personalities—that the protagonist has had multiple personality since childhood:

“When he [Samuel, the protagonist] was seven he would come home from a birthday party and be absolutely amazed that he couldn’t recall what flavor of ice cream he had eaten that afternoon” (2, p. 25).

“…there were many times I told him stuff that he didn’t seem to remember three weeks later” (2, p. 34).

“He looked surprised, as if the words [he had just spoken] had come from a place [an alternate personality?] he didn’t have total control over” (2, p. 100).

“Mostly we talked about memory…He told me he [Samuel] had a friend with a photographic memory…[In contrast,] I [Samuel] make lists. Samuel…pulled out a notebook…Everything I need to remember” (2, p. 118-119).

“I started wondering who Samuel really was…Did I even know his true self?…Because I noticed how quickly he switched from one personality to the next, and the more I noticed it the more obvious it became that the version I knew was just one of many” (2, pp. 201-202).

Comment

Combining Samuel’s memory gaps with his “friend’s” photographic memory, you have the subtitle of this blog. Perhaps the author has an excellent memory with meaningful memory gaps.

The above quotations make a case for multiple personality, whose two main diagnostic criteria are alternate personalities and memory gaps.

Typical of most novels, it is not labeled as such and is unacknowledged.

In conclusion, as the novel’s front flap says: “Everything I Don’t Remember is a…tale about…memory. But it is also a story about a writer [investigator of Samuel’s death] who, by filling out the contours of Samuel’s story, is actually trying to grasp a truth about himself” (2, front flap).

1. Wikipedia. “August Prize.”

2. Jonas Hassen Khemiri. Everything I Don’t Remember [2015 in Swedish]. Translated from Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles. New York, ATRIA Books, 2016.