A review by black_girl_reading
Everything I Don't Remember by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

3.0

Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Everything I Don’t Remember was written as a series of interviews with those most connected to Samuel, the book’s muse, whose tragic death is neither clearly an accident nor a suicide. About identity and how a person is seen through the eyes of those around them, this book highlights who Samuel was to those closet to him in contemporary Stockholm. I think that this book did a good job of highlighting racism in Sweden, the migrant crisis, the struggle between apathy and involvement for the disenfranchised, love, sexuality, family, aging, heartbreak, etc etc in the larger sense of these concepts. What I think the book was less successful at, and particularly the audiobook (surprisingly as it is supposed to be like a podcast?) was delineating Samuel from the other voices of people who knew him, in a way that wasn’t a bit simplistic or superficial. I don’t know what it was that made characters feel more like caricatures than individuals (maybe the translation) but I found it hard to get invested in the twisting mystery of who was telling the truth and who was lying and the grey area in between, as relationships were represented and misrepresented and blurred beyond clarity. I didn’t dislike this book, and I think it’s an important diversification of the Nordic crime drama, but I wasn’t all in it for this one.