A new voice in fiction

  “The only way to forget, it seemed, was never to remember in the first place.”
  The value of memories and the comfort of forgetting the past are strong themes artfully woven throughout Stefan Merrill Block’s debut novel, “The Story of Forgetting.”
  The story is told by Abel Haggard, an elderly hunchback who is haunted by memories of his mistakes, and Seth Waller, whose mother has early-onset Alzheimer’s and a past she has kept hidden from her son.
  Amid these two narratives is the tale, one passed from family member to family member, of a golden land called Isidora.
  “A land without memory, where everything one needed was at arm’s length, where there was never reason to be afraid, where nothing was ever possessed and so nothing could ever be lost.”
   Seth describes himself as a Master of Nothingness, doing whatever he can to escape notice, to be forgotten. But, as his mother’s illness worsens, he sets out on a scientific quest to trace the roots of her disease. He questions his mom about her youth for clues to where she came from, clues he must decipher through the fog of her dementia.
  “The people from her childhood, who I knew next to nothing about, would often reappear this way, as unexplained characters from the pieces of a past life that increasingly made up the whole of her present. Soon after she was put in The Waiting Room, I had a perversely optimistic thought: that maybe if my mom forgot all the ways she tried to make herself forget, she would be left with no choice but to remember.”
  Seth and Abel’s paths eventually cross as Seth continues his investigation of his family’s history, and Abel may hold the answers to all the teen’s questions.
  “I wanted only to comfort the boy, to say something that might explain anything. But what? ... To say that I had waited for so long that I had almost forgotten there was something I was waiting for, that waiting itself nearly became the point? Or to say that I would have kept on, that I would have waited forever, that I would have held on to the memory of us until the end of time because waiting was the only place left for my love?”
  Random House has found a talented voice in Block. He’s only in his 20s, so I would expect to hear much more from this promising new author.
  “The Story of Forgetting” is a poignant, poetically written novel, one readers will not forget.