We tell our leaders to keep us secure, but in our personal lives we resist playing it safe. It's a contradiction made for a Ward Just political thriller. Thomas is a painter in the south of France, putting some distance on his past as a CIA collaborator, Still, he's tight with his buddies in the spy game. When his wife dies among unsavory characters, Thomas is alone with his insecurities, and perhaps in deeper than he thought. Eventually face to face with her killer, Thomas knows just what to do in the interrogator's chair. It's a story told by indirection, a narrative full of known unknowns. The reader doesn't know which details are important, and neither do the spooks. The novel explores the nature of perception, memory, craft and terrorism, and the limits of the impulse to never forget.

My first Ward Just book. A rather dull start but picks up nicely after the first chapter. I was told to watch for the changes in narrator - it's amazing! You can have two different narrators in the same paragraph & it's done so seamlessly you might notice if you weren't expecting it.Although Just's prose is beautiful the story itself is all that memorable although I got caught up in the reading and couldn't put it down. ( )

Americans were once exhorted to “remember the Alamo,” and now they are reminded that “we will never forget.” The point seems to be that memories of wrongs done to us must always be kept alive and festering, but an opposite tendency urges us, with Confucius, to “forget injuries, never kindnesses,” or, more simply, to “forgive and forget.” Ward Just’s Forgetfulness is a study of the virtues of forgetting and the difficulty of doing so. It is a gripping examination of an artist’s reaction to the murder of his wife, but it is more than a well-done psychological thriller. It is, thanks to the formal integrity with which Just has laid out his protagonist’s agony, art of the highest order.

Thomas Railles is an American artist long resident in a remote French village. His wife, Florette, with whom he is deeply in love, is murdered by a group of men, apparently jihadis, who find her incapacitated on a mountain path. They first attempt to carry her to safety, but finally decide, in the encroaching darkness, that they must get about their business. As the men are deliberating Florette’s fate, and she is lying on the ground in pain, she remembers her past: her childhood in the village, her dream of fleeing that village for Paris where, in Place Vendôme, she would be a fashionable couturier. She remembers, too, coming to understand that “Place Vendôme was not beyond her wildest dreams, in fact it was her wildest dream; but it was only a dream and so she had left it behind.” She also recalls dinner that evening with her husband and his American friends. Thomas had explained the discussion she couldn’t quite follow as being about “capitalism’s responsibility for the turbulence of the modern world, its heedlessness and chaos, its savagery, its utter self-absorption, capitalism the canary in the mine shaft.” She remembers her husband, on the day he was to propose to her, standing with the owner of the local café against a band of ugly Americans whose blind and aggressive leader, it emerges, may have been in the twin towers on the day they were brought down. One of the women with the blind man berates Thomas: “There was a time Americans stuck together, members of the same tribe. Cut one, the others bleed.” That time, she tells Thomas, is “New York. Right now. This minute. It’s beautiful.”

Thus in this first chapter, a tour de force, we see the themes laid out which will run through the pages of Just’s masterpiece: memory and forgetting, capitalist brutality and the brutality of its opponents, an American fighting to protect something valuable and an American blundering, blind, in a rage.

Just, in a previous life as a foreign correspondent, reported from many of the world’s hottest of hot spots, and his books tend, like this one, to be grittily political. His work, therefore, is often, more or less reflexively, compared to that of Graham Greene, but the comparison only works if one is talking about Greene’s best work (The Quiet American, say), and if one understands that the philosophy and political thinking which underlies Just’s work, less bound by dogma than Greene’s, endow his novels with a more complicated, and therefore more compelling, view of the world.

Railles’s past, in which he was an odd-job man for the CIA, complicates his reactions to Florette’s death and to those who killed her. The American buddies with whom he complains about capitalism are full-time operatives, and as such they don’t like to leave cases open, questions unanswered. It will never be enough for them to tell themselves, as Thomas briefly does, that Florette’s death was a mishap, a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Preferring closure, preferring coherence, they go to work and ultimately bring Thomas—not entirely against his will—together with the men who killed his wife. We understand, as Thomas watches them being tortured (and is aware that he is seeing the least of their ordeals) that as inadequate a response as forgetting may be, vengeance, too, is unsatisfying.

He shares a meal with the head interrogator who tells him: “You need an excellent memory. You must never, ever forget. Forgetfulness leads to—.”

Thomas interrupts him: “Forgiveness?”

“No,” the interrogator assures him, “not that.”

What forgetfulness—or its opposite, never forgetting—does lead to, for the interrogator or for Thomas, is never definitively spelled out, and this is one of the many strengths of Just’s novel. The questions he asks are not easy ones, and thus he can offer no easy answers. Like Thomas, all we can do is to “wait for the light that arrives ages later, light even from a dead star,” and as we wait, console ourselves with the beauty of Forgetfulness.

(This review appeared originally years ago in the now defunct Asahi Evening News. It's disappeared from the Internet, so I post it here.)

I have known of Ward Just and his writing for decades, but Forgetfulness is my first experience of reading Just's work, which goes all the way back to 1970. It was a great place to start, because this is an absolutely beautiful book. The jacket copy speaks of it as being about the "shadow world" of espionage and international intrigue, but Forgetfulness goes so far beyond that in its language and artistry. Early on in the narrative, protagonist Thomas Railles, a former CIA "odd-jobber," says something that perhaps characterizes a deeper theme of this exquisite novel -

"Facts anchor the work, whatever it is you're composing, a picture or a piece of music or a novel or a poem. But memory has to anchor the facts, alas. And so I fall short ..."

Ward Just, who I have been told lives part of the time in France, where most of this novel takes place, never falls short, whether in facts or memory. On the same page, shortly thereafter, Thomas calls forgetfulness "the old man's friend." And as the story gracefully unfolds, one begins slowly to understand why he might feel that way, because this is a story not so much about CIA operatives or part-time odd-jobbers or murder and methods of torture and inquistion as it is a probing look at loss, sadness and regret. Thomas Railles is a painter, and a good one, recognized and respected in the international art world, and, if all of the details given here of sketching and painting are any indication, I would not be surprised to learn that Just too is a painter, and one who knows that the line between various artistic endeavors is often a very thin or blurred one.

"To some degree," Just writes of his portraitist protagonist, "all portraits were self-portraits, as all novels were to some degree autobiographical ... A visage was sometimes true or false at the same time, the natural affect of a hundred brushstrokes or a dozen rewrites. Autobiography resided in the style of compostition and from that the viewer could conclude whatever he wished or nothing at all."

Whatever he is, War Just is not, at least in his art, forgetful. This guy knows what he's doing and can create powerful scenes that look easy, like the one in which Railles, still grieving the loss of his wife, murdered in a chance encounter with terrorists, is caught in a sudden storm and turns to face the elements, raising "his walking stick, brandishing it like a medieval warrior in combat with a dragon or other supernatural phenomenon." Shades of Shakespeare's King Lear!

Forgetfulness is a book which shows a writer at the peak of his creative powers. Ward Just could perhaps be called, at least chronologically, that "old man" he describes herein, but "forgetfulness" has not yet become a serious problem. This is a wonderful story, and I will recommend it highly. And I'll also be reading more of Ward Just soon! ( )