THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 21ALL CHILDHOODS SEEMlike crime scenes
when recollected, especially when you are
growing up amid the Troubles in 1980s
Northern Ireland, in a town called Derry,
“a place where even peace felt like war.”
Objects, toys, photographs, pieces of cloth-
ing become holding places for memory,
clues in the rebuilding of a life: an aban-
doned glass eye, a belt, a skeleton key, a
shovel, a mud-encrusted revolver washed
up from the river, the design on a cigarette
packet.
These are the coordinates with which
Darran Anderson fixes his “Inventory,” a
memoir, a microhistory and a crime scene
— or, rather, a collection of them. Part 1 ends
with a deliberately, powerfully unemotive
“inventory” of atrocities perpetrated across
the Troubles: “Every single one was a story,
from multiple perspectives.” Part 2 sees An-
derson go in search of the ghosts of his own
family, including those still living. Though
unspeakably sad, these resurrections are
not especially dramatic; this part of the
book feels like an attempted rescue, a re-
demption that Anderson, alienated from his
hometown and country in more ways than
one, would otherwise have been unable to
enact. We follow him through his dawning
adulthood, his discovery of the “ephemera”
of art movements, i.e. their pamphlets,
handbills, photographs; his attraction to
first-generation documents as holy texts, as
conduits of lineage; and his turning back,
once again, toward his own biography, un-
covering the mysteries surrounding the
deaths of his aunt and uncle, the secrets of
his father.
The title of Anderson’s first book, 2015’s
“Imaginary Cities,” underlines his obses-
sion with invisible parallel worlds within
his own. “Inventory” reads like a dam-
burst, then, an overwhelming of Derry, of
Northern Ireland, with memory, its cours-
ing rivers, undercurrents, treacherous ac-
cumulations. Where the totaled car of a
dead joy rider and the presence of the fire
brigade on a country road become “the af-
termath of giants”; where the green glow
of night-sights on a British Army watch-
tower turns the landscape into “oceanic
depths.”
But then, violence eddies: “Pools of
frozen blood. A booby trap tripped in a der-
elict building. Two brothers lying dead on a
lane, having set off to meet their girl-
friends. A body by the city’s waterworks.
Bleeding to death in a bedsit. Quarry. Half
Moon Lake. Forest.” The memoir takes its
title from a quote by the French novelist
Georges Perec, included in the epigraph:
“Describe your street. Describe another
street. Compare. Make an inventory of
your pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself
about the provenance, the use, what will
become of each of the objects you take out.”
Perec’s influence reverberates throughout
the memoir: his reading of random por-
tents, his techniques for truly seeing what
is right in front of you, the various binds he
and his fellow Oulipo writers and math-
ematicians used in order to command the
inanimate world to speak.
Anderson too has that same uncanny
ability to draw image from object, to turn
matter into a point of ingress into the past
— so much so that you feel your own mem-
ory coming alive in tandem with his. His
uncluttered, graceful prose transmits the
tactile experience of his childhood while
grounding it in historical context, in a way
that makes the details of one’s existence
seem at once specific and pointless.
“Rivers exist in deep geological time,” he
writes, “and yet they are forever re-
starting.” This isn’t a book about the Trou-
bles so much as it is a book about disputed
borders, about where the city ends and the
improvised playgrounds of industrial
edge-lands begin, where fantasies of adult-
hood cross into adult realities, and where
the specter of conflict spills over into ev-
eryday life. “I am standing on the thresh-
old of another trembling world,” the M.P.
and I.R.A. member Bobby Sands wrote in
his prison diary in 1981, as he resolved to
die on a hunger strike. “A slow cataclysm of
time,” is how Anderson puts it.In Northern Ireland during the 1980s, re-
ality was slippery. Rioters were watching
themselves on TV and styling themselves
for it. There were random bombings,
shootings at pubs, kidnappings, tanks lin-
ing residential streets. Profoundly de-
sensitizing violence on a daily basis. And
yet, as “Inventory” illustrates, childhoods
still took place. Anderson evokes the feel-
ing of eternal boyhood despite the carnage,
each of his friends given a pithy epithet —
“timid,” “crafty,” “jolly” — as if he were
hanging with the Seven Dwarfs. He con-
jures sensations long lost to the past: “We
lay on warm, porous tarmac and frosted
concrete to kick footballs free from under-
neath parked cars”; the gorse bushes
burning “like herds of wild blind horses be-
ing driven into the sea”; the damp circular
imprint made by the repeated impact of a
ball against a wall. And it’s as if he can’t
take his eye off these memories, to the
point that he sees afterimages, remembers
them like “a fluorescent baton, the swing of
it leaving a momentary arc in the air and in
my vision.”
Ballast or flotsam? he asks himself,
about all this weight of memory, hidden
away. “Times will change and people will
come and say that certain things did not
happen,” he writes. “The entire existence
of some will be washed away. Yet there are
stories within this junk, and souls within
these stories.” 0Troubles Past
A memoir-in-objects of growing up in 1980s Northern Ireland.
By DAVID KEENAN
INVENTORY
A Memoir
By Darran Anderson
406 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
Neighborhood boys throw rocks at the police in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, in 1981.PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER KEMP/ASSOCIATED PRESSAnderson evokes the feeling of
eternal boyhood despite the
carnage.DAVID KEENANis the author of “For the Good
Times.” His new novel, “Xstabeth,” was just
published.
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