Shelf Unbound/Podster: Your novel has been compared to the podcast Serial, in that a novelist seeks to determine whether the main character Samuel’s death was an accident or suicide by piecing together a picture of his life through interviews with his friends, family, and neighbors. Why did you decide to tell this story in this fragmented style? Jonas Hassen Khemiri: I think one ambition was to try to capture how I actually remember things. My memory has never felt like a trustworthy third person narrator. I always remember things in fragments. Often there are nameless voices that keep disagreeing about what really happened rumbling around in my brains. In this novel I was able to invite these voices to recreate the life of Samuel. As I was writing the novel I also had a close friend who passed away. I was struck with how all of us who were grieving were really good at defending our version of what had happened. We were constantly remembering
the things that could rid us of guilt— the version of the truth that could convince us that we could not have done anything differently. This is reminiscent of what happens in the novel. Shelf Unbound/Podster: How did you go about creating the character of Samuel? Jonas: Samuel goes around with a panicky feeling that everything in life is perishable. When writing his life I thought a lot about how much time and energy I have devoted to trying to acquire certain memories and how many words I have written down with the ambition of making life permanent. In the novel Samuel is being remembered in different ways, and we are never 100 percent sure of who has the final version of who he is. Readers have to piece Samuel together from all the memories that he has left behind. Personally I have always been a big fan of books that force me as a reader to take an active part in assembling the fiction.
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