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Caroline Adderson's debut novel, A History of Forgetting, traces an uncommon path, beginning in a Vancouver hair salon and winding up at the site of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. The book opens with hairstylist Malcolm Firth joining Faye's of Kerrisdale, a salon that caters to an aging clientele, at the same time that his aging partner, Denis, is slipping into the cruel arms of Alzheimer's. When Faye sells the shop, it morphs into a super-hip, urban salon staffed by the usual downtown clichés and casualties, including Alison, a young apprentice who shares the narration with Malcolm as their worlds begin to collide.
Malcolm stays at the salon and continues to service his blue-rinse brigade, and he and Alison both befriend an outgoing gay stylist named Christian who becomes the social epicentre of the salon. When Christian is brutally murdered by Nazi skinheads, his death tears through the salon like a pipe bomb. Alison's grief leads to an obsession with the Holocaust, setting her on a journey to Auschwitz. Malcolm also becomes unwittingly transformed by the event and accompanies Alison to Poland to work out his own demons. A History of Forgetting asks many questions about racism and the illusion of security, and challenges the slacker entropy of Generations X and Y. Adderson, a Governor General's Award nominee for her short-story collection Bad Imaginings, treats her subject with dignity, free of sensationalism. --Moe Berg
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Malcolm Firth is an aging hairdresser whose partner, Denis, is wasting away from memory loss. Malcolm works at a zany Vancouver hair salon where he trains Alison, a young ingenue from the suburbs, amidst a staff of eccentric urbanoid hair stylists. Their clients include a troop of old people, one of whom is a Holocaust survivor. It is this old woman who provides innocent Alison with her first glimpse into the depredations of the human race. When one of Alison's gay friends is brutally murdered by skinheads, she is soon propelled on a harrowing journey of sorrow and the getting of wisdom. Haunted by the death of her friend, she wanders the rings of a psychological and spiritual inferno, bringing the slowly dissipating Malcolm with her. Her obsession takes them to post-communist Poland where they struggle to reconstitute the past in the killing grounds of Auschwitz. How do we remember our history? Why are the same cruelties repeated through time? These are the urgent questions that underpin this powerful first novel from one of Canada's most emotionally daring young writers. Rich in its emotional ground, beautifully pitched, and written in a refined and assured prose style, A History of Forgetting is a most compelling book. Caroline Adderson is a virtuoso conjurer of the human condition. (1999)
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