Michael Mejia draws connections between the rise of fascism in Vienna and the orchestral compositions of Anton Webern. At once rhapsodic and brilliantly patterned, intoxicating and starkly lucid, avant-garde and deeply lyrical

Michael Mejia, Forgetfulness: A Novel, Fiction Collective 2, 2005.

"Forgetfulness is a novel in two parts. The first part is a fictional monograph on the life of the Austrian modernist composer Anton von Webern (1883-1945). The collage-work monograph unfolds in a Webernian sequence of events and silences combining quotes from Webern, his friends and associates, and various historical and literary figures with short scenes, monologues, dialogues, newspaper articles, and theater and film scripts. The result is a lyrical panorama of early twentieth century Vienna, the unsettled and unsettling Mitteleurope that gave birth to both the fascinatingly esoteric, influential, and dogmatic methods of the Second Viennese School and the inexplicable Fascist horror of the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler. Through intermingling nodes of history, science, biography, and music, Webern and Hitler are brought together both physically and thematically, illustrating a simultaneously progressive and regressive vision, the apotheosis and cataclysm of the Enlightenment project.The second part of the book takes place in Vienna on May 1st, 1986, shortly before the election of Kurt Waldheim as President of the Austrian Republic and shortly after the Chernobyl disaster. The three simultaneous, intertwining monologues of an archivist, a retired opera singer, and the author of the monograph, revisit the themes and events of the first part, commenting on postwar conceptions, analyses, and revisions of the period during which Webern lived, while continuously haunted by the spectres of Waldheim and Chernobyl, the persistence of crimes that are immanent, unpaid for, or only dimly, disingenuously recalled."

"Michael Mejia's beautiful book Forgetfulness, like the music of Webern, Berg, and Schoenberg it describes, is at once rhapsodic and brilliantly patterned; intoxicating and starkly lucid; avant-garde and deeply lyrical; cleverly calculated and fiercely loving." -M. T. Anderson

"Like archeological discoveries that recast the present, Michael Mejia's astonishing novel Forgetfulness reconstructs what art does best. Imagine music-and fiction-as a portrait of how the world works, instead of as entertainment or any of its other uses, and you'll get an intimation of his achievement." - Steve Tomasula

"Forgetfulness is a real treasure and a necesary revelation." —Rickki Ducornet

"Forgetfulness is frightfully complex, but well worth the will to understand." —Creative Loafing

"I have to admit: This was a book I held up to my husband and said, "Oh, for cripe's sake, get a load of this." I thought it was one of those books that makes you work so hard to "get it", and gives you only half a sneer in return. I won't put a finger on what I'm talking about or give an example, but you know you have read these books. I've definitely written some annoying short stories of my own like this, so I know what I'm rolling my eyes about.
Here's a description from the back jacket:
The first part of Forgetfulness is a fictional monograph on the life of the Austrian modernist composer Anton von Webern (1883-1945).The collage-work monograph unfolds in a Webernian sequence of events and silences combining quotes from Webern, his friends and associates, and various historical and literary figures with short scenes, monologues, dialogues, newspaper articles, and theater and film scripts. The result is a lyrical panorama of early twentieth century Vienna.
I mean yikes. And there was more. Also, flipping through it, I saw that part of it was divided into three sections on the page, between "Soloist" and "Composer" and "Archivist" and I anticipated a fractured narrative, with time jumping around, and thought it would be a pain in my ass.
Wow, was I wrong.
I read this book while I was coming down with the flu, and as sick as I was, and as miserable as I was, and as much as I just wanted to close my eyes and think of clean snow, I couldn't put it down. I have never had a reaction like that to a book this experimental. I've thought they were funny before, brilliant before, even engaging, but I have never read a book without traditional characters or plot with such avid determination from cover to cover.
This book is gorgeous. That three section part that I was so belligerent about reading was genius. Instead of feeling distracted and irritated, it was actually fun to kind of read around on the page, then turn it, then read around on the next page... the formal experimentation totally worked. And all the mixing of different texts and characters and times and places was effortless to navigate. It formed a picture, at the end of the book, that could have been rendered in no other way. And that's the point of experimental fiction, right, to do something in a new way that couldn't be done in the old way. This book offers the reader a massive pay-off for the diligence involved in reading an experimental form. The thing is... the challenge in this book is not even like work. Go buy it, read it, see how it's done." - Lydia Netzer

"Michael Mejia's Forgetfulness draws connections between the rise of fascism in Vienna and the orchestral compositions of Anton Webern, a fellow-traveler of Arnold Schonburg. In some way, it's de rigeur that we see Webern's challenging modernist compositions as a tonic against the rise of fascism (the opposite is unthinkable, isn't it?), though the book isn't exactly clear about how this might work. A cursory listen to Webern's music makes it sound to this reader/ listener like it fits the period, the soundtrack to a particularly cerebral and futuristic horror movie, all jumped-up strings and abrupt tonal disruptions. This same cut-up technique recurs in Mejia's curiously passionless prose—the first section is made up of alternating scenes of life in Vienna (and later, Berlin), and the second represents typographically three simultaneous monologues as three horizontal columns.
Near as I can tell, the near perfect silence of Mejia's sentences is meant to mirror what he hears in Webern's music, and to demonstrate his sympathy, intellectual and aesthetic, with Webern. Fascists, it seems, are always boiling over with animal passion and a love for Wagner, and I guess if we are dividing political paradigms playground style, anti-fascist intellect and cool reason are stroked by Modernist classical music and sentences like this: "Some of the saints had been defaced or stolen, some scarred by flames, but a few remained, their identities still ascertainable by the objects in their hands or the wounds of their martyrdom" (61). The first section of the novel especially is rife with sentences of this type, always competently coordinated, but without the spark of human experience. The aridity of the sentences, and Mejia's implied argument about the proper way to avoid fascism, made me hunger for the Three Penny Opera, which treated roughly similar times and themes, but did it in a way that feels more fleshy, and more engaging even if it makes the listener yearn just a little for order.
The argument of the book's second half I find even more puzzling. Mejia implies that if we took Webern and his music seriously, we could never elect Kurt Waldheim to the West German Presidency because of his ties to the National Socialist party as a young man. But Mejia can't mean to say something as simple as "those who forget (musical) history are doomed to repeat (political) it," can he? And anyhow, it's a strange way to talk about Webern, as if he were some buried historical touchstone, given that he meant to make the music of the future. And Mejia's approach to music is unashamedly humanist; if we let the music quicken our souls, Mejia says, we would see that we are moving in the wrong direction. But this novel and the music that so fascinates Mejia leave the soul behind to embrace something much more insubstantial.
Whatever its politics, Mejia's second section is better at finding the rhythms of people's daily lives, and there are many revealing moments here as the three voices contemplate their lives. The stories never really come together or satisfy as narrative arcs, but it's fitting that they end abruptly, like Webern's music; when the theme has been established, there is no need for elaboration, and we all, it is assumed, know how the election turns out." - Matt Dube

"Michael Mejia, educated in the United States and England, now teaches creative writing at Berry College in Georgia. If I may judge from his book, apparently his first one, any student looking for a teacher would do well to consider Mejia.
In a very indirect way, this book is about Anton Webern. Much of what Mejia has to disclose about Webern is reflected from peripheries and appears in fragments that transcend conventional notions of chronological sequence. In the pursuit of his subject he projects the picture of a man who was closed within his genius and related with difficulty to the outside world. As that world became more difficult so too did his relation to it. He died in 1945, shoot by an American soldier in a tragic, if possibly ambiguous, misunderstanding.
More broadly Forgetfulness is about Austria and the frightfulness of the war years. Given the period covered by Webern’s life, Mejia necessarily also depicts the Nazis and their horrific effect upon themselves and the Austrians. Forgetfulness is in two parts with the second part taking place around the time of Waldheim’s rise to prominence. His anticipated election to the office of chancellor reawakens the uneasy feelings and memories of those old enough to remember the Nazi regime.
There are two gross lapses in the text. In the first Mejia ascribes the rescue of Vienna in 1683 to Prince Eugene of Savoy. The prince was only twenty years old in 1683 and although he participated with distinction in the campaign, his role was minor and the rescuer of the city from the Turks was John III Sobieski of Poland. On a later page he uses “due to the fact that,” a vile phrase that is a nasty surprise in such a beautifully written book.
The reader must work in part one and by indirections find directions out and this remains true of part two but in a particularly fascinating and intricate manner. This part is a trio in which the performers are a soprano, a composer, and an archivist. Each page is divided into three and the text arises from or in conjunction with the three characters. Chronology is there but not so strongly as to miss its footing when Mejia requires that it do so. The reader can read down the page or across the page or in a different order. Whatever the reader does, the reader must hold in his mind the details of whatever has been already read. Mejia slyly inserts “trio” into a list of compositions, thus asserting its status as musical art.
I was reminded of Celestial Harmonies by Péter Esterházy in the similarity of diffuse allusions, a method that defied chronology, and even the division of the work into two parts.
This is a dramatically ingenious work. As a first work it is even more remarkable and creates a sharp anticipation of what is to follow from such an author. Strongly recommended." - Bob Williams

Excerpt:

The eye, acquiring cyclopean proportions when seen reversely through the magnifying glass before it, is not still. It makes no grand or deliberate transits in any particular direction but it appears to be trained on a single object or isolated region. Its incremental and seemingly random shifts, then, are most likely involuntary. These are so minute, in fact, that at any lesser level of observation than this, they should not be considered motion. Rather, it might be said that the eye quivers in spite of itself, with life and in spite of life, in spite of the same life force that has trained it on its narrow field, that has mandated that it hold still and focus for the purpose of close observation, scrutiny, single-minded study. The eye quivers in a way that resembles the visibly unstable state of a still pool of liquid, struggling to maintain its stillness.
The gray-blue iris, like a soft sea creature beneath the aquarian dome of the cornea, also moves, though with a more calculated exactitude than the greater ocular structure. It moves economically and without caprice, as does the geometer. The circle at the center of the iris, the dark void known as the pupil, appears to be moving, but, in fact, the inside edges of the iris' striated membrane are contracting and relaxing, varying the magnitude of light information allowed to stream through the eye's lens and into the posterior chamber, to disperse through and illumine the thick jelly of the vitreous body, to bombard the retina's millions of photoreceptors.
All of this happens now.
The photoreceptors of this eye are fully operational, capturing an unending stream of data, light information-fragments, particles of form and color, distance and size-assembling a model of the world (of the object of observation, the isolated region) and sending it on for processing, recording, and analysis. For appreciation.
It may be noted that the iris' subtle movements also seem to encompass a number of additional corrections of the pupil in response to movements of the magnifying glass itself, as the latter is not wholly immobilized.
A two-dimensional, peach-colored polygon of light appears on the wet surface to one side of the iris, on the outside curve of the red-veined white of the eye, or sclera. A faint double of this same figure glistens on the outside curve of the cornea. The polygon, like the pupil, is subjected to continuous, though less precise transformations, mutations, not solely because of the micromotions of the eye and magnifying glass-or rather of the hand presumed to be holding the magnifying glass-but most likely because of an unseen changeable object or set of objects partially obscuring the source of the light: the branch of a tree, a passing cloud, a gradually lifting fog.
Michael Mejia: From the novella "Report of Ito Sadohara"