Margaret Atwood called Lewis Hyde’s 1983 book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property “a masterpiece”—and she should know. Hyde’s books are sui generis, and his most recent one, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is a persuasive exploration of the process of forgetting, and its connection to our ability to forgive. Does forgiveness require forgetfulness? Hyde believes that it does, that forgetting is essential to forgiveness. Drawing on sources both ancient and contemporary, from Hesiod to Jorge Luis Borges and Desmond Tutu, Hyde finds insights and wisdom in many different cultures and traditions. The structure of A Primer for Forgetting is unusual, but effective. Hyde declares himself to be “weary of argument, tired of striving for mastery, of marshaling the evidence, of drilling down to bedrock to anchor every claim, of inventing transitions to mask the native jumpiness of my mind, of defending myself against imaginary swarms of critics.” A Primer for Forgetting is part commonplace book and part notebook, divided into four “Notebooks,” which Hyde labels Myth, Self, Nation and Creation. Each notebook is further subdivided into a series of one- to six-page expansions on different aspects of memory and forgetfulness. In “Notebook IV: Creation,” for example, Hyde describes a concept in law where, “before the widespread use of written records,” the accepted definition of “legal memory” was the period of time which could be recalled by living persons, “any prior period being [thought of as] ‘time out of mind,’ or ‘time immemorial.’” We are all familiar with the exhortation to “Never forget!” and the belief that, by forever remembering a trauma or an offence, we can ensure that it will never be repeated. A Primer for Forgetting will make you think twice about this simplistic point of view.

—Michael Hayward