Inventory

by Darran Anderson

Overview

"Inventory is a remarkable memoir; a work of auto-archaeology, really, in which Darran Anderson disinters his own and his country’s hard pasts, shaking life, love and loss out of the objects of his youth in Northern Ireland." —Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland: A Deep Time Journey

A lyrical memoir and family history told through four generations of fathers and sons in Northern Ireland

Inventory, Darran Anderson’s searing yet tender memoir, is an interwoven tale of political conflict, trauma, history, family, and resistance. With great rhythm, humor, and sometimes painful detail, Anderson tells the story of his city and family through the objects and memories that define them.

Growing up in Derry, Northern Ireland, amid the unspeakable violence of the Troubles, Anderson was accustomed to poverty and fracture. Avoiding British soldiers, IRA operatives, unexploded bombs, and stray bullets, he and his friends explored their hometown with boundless imagination and innocence despite their dire circumstances. But his parents and extended family, Catholics living in Protestant-controlled Northern Ireland, could not evade the persecution. His father joined the IRA, spent time in prison, and yearned to escape the hellish reality of the Troubles.

Throughout his inventive, evocative memoir, Anderson chronicles the history of Derry’s evolution from an island backwater to a crucial Allied naval base during World War II, and the diverging paths of his two grandfathers in the wake of the American military’s arrival: one, an alcoholic army deserter, drowns in the legendary River Foyle—the river that will take the life of the grandfather’s wife years later—while the other, a smuggler, lives off the river, retrieving the bodies of the drowned.

Fifteen years after leaving Derry, Anderson returns to confront the past and its legacy when yet another family member goes missing in the Foyle. In Inventory, his gripping attempt to see who, or what, he can salvage from history’s shadows, Anderson creates “a presence in the shape of an absence,” unearthing the buried fates of family, country, and self.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374277581
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	08/04/2020
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	1,093,103
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Darran Anderson is the author of Imaginary Cities, chosen as a best book of 2015 by the Financial Times, The Guardian, and the A.V. Club. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the TLS, frieze magazine, Wired, and the Architectural Review. He was born in Derry, Ireland, and lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

03/30/2020

Poverty, suicide, and Northern Ireland’s sectarian bloodshed shadow this bleak coming-of-age saga as Anderson (Imaginary Cities) recalls growing up in the 1980s and ’90s in a Catholic neighborhood in Derry, site of the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre of 14 protesters by British soldiers. It’s a tense, atmospheric study of life in a war zone: gunfire echoed at night, killing innocents; IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries targeted each other—and suspect civilians—with bombings and shootings; Anderson and his pals dodged army patrols (while the patrols dodged snipers), endured humiliations at checkpoints and faced vicious beatings if they strayed into the wrong street. He also recounts his equally conflicted family history, including his maternal grandfather’s domestic violence, his father’s boyhood in a squatter camp and stint in the IRA, and his relatives’ propensity for drowning, sometimes intentionally, in the River Foyle, a murky, mysterious presence threading through his vivid cityscape of Derry. Anderson’s evocative prose takes disasters in stride while measuring their toll with restrained lyricism. (“ll the things they’d owned... were just smoldering ash and debris, charred imitations of what they had once been, in rooms with no roof, under a sky innocent in its ignorance,” he writes of an anti-Catholic arson.) The result is a grim but engrossing frontline take on the Troubles. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"[Anderson has the] 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 memory 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." —David Keenan, The New York Times Book Review

“Powerful and morally persuasive . . . [Inventory] is reminiscent of a long-exposure photograph, tracking the effect of time scored through life, and place, and landscape, and the human heart.” –Neil Hegarty, The Irish Times

"A nuanced portrait of a city where everyone seems at once obsessed by the past and yet prone to historical amnesia . . . [Anderson's] chiseled, paratactic sentences, which are arranged in short, loosely connected chapters, similarly make an implicit plea for subtle parsing and interpretation rather than literal-mindedness. In Inventory, coming to terms with the past has as much to do with imagination as it does with figuring out the facts." —Max McGuinness, AirMail

"In intimate, beautifully allusive vignettes, Anderson guides readers through his youth, when he was beleaguered by the perpetual violence within his Catholic working-class neighborhood. . .Simmering violence bubbles underneath the entire text, often boiling over, and Anderson ably plumbs the salvatory theme of how his peaceable father, despite his mysterious past, helped break the cycle of violence for his son. Though different in mood and tone, this thoughtful memoir will appeal to readers of Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, among other chronicles of the Troubles."—Kirkus Reviews

"A tense, atmospheric study of life in a war zone . . . Anderson's evocative prose takes disasters in stride while measuring their toll with restrained lyricism . . . [an] engrossing frontline take on the Troubles." —Publishers Weekly

"Inventory is a remarkable memoir; a work of auto-archaeology, really, in which Darran Anderson disinters his own and his country’s hard pasts, shaking life, love and loss out of the objects of his youth in Northern Ireland. Bleak, tender, inventive and oddly gripping, this is a book of restless ghosts, written in defiance of darkness, and told by means of diving into what Nabokov once called 'the dream life of debris'" —Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland: A Deep Time Journey

“A portrait of a family and a portrait of a city—vivid, intense, engrossing and always beautifully written.” —Kevin Barry, author of Night Boat to Tangier, longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize

“Processed by Darran Anderson’s restless, roving intelligence and obsessive curiosity, Derry rises from the pages of this book as a place that’s at once intensely familiar and uniquely strange. Crossing the faultlines between family, history and myth, Inventory is a vivid, singular act of memory.” —Chris Power, author of Mothers: Stories

“A searing memoir about growing up in poverty in Derry.” —Lucy Caldwell, author of All the Beggars Riding

From the Publisher

07/01/2020

As with his previous work, Imaginary Cities, Anderson's personal and generational memoir eschews a straightforward narrative for a freer form of nonfiction. Each chapter uses a mundane object—a bird's egg, fences, empty bottles—as pinpoints for reveries on his own working-class youth in Derry, Ireland, and the lives of his parents and grandparents, available to him only through stray photos and carefully edited family stories. Ever-present in both foreground and background is the Northern Ireland conflict and its effects, with the titular chapter simply presenting a six-page prose list of incidents of violence during the Troubles: kidnappings, bombings, murders; injuries and deaths, both deliberate and accidental; along with victims, whether military, paramilitary, or civilian. The effects of this sustained environment of conflict take their toll on each generation of the family, with depression, addiction, and suicide making appearances—but most grim is the culture of near-impermeable silence Anderson finds surrounding the tragedies of both family and country. VERDICT A poetic and brutal reflection on the ways the unspoken past haunts the present, the construction of histories from fragments and secrets, and the physical, mental, and emotional traumas that result when violence becomes part of the daily landscape.—Kathleen McCallister, William & Mary Libs., Williamsburg, VA

Library Journal

2020-05-04
An Irish journalist’s memoir of his complicated years growing up in Derry, Northern Ireland, in the 1970s and ’80s—and the inevitable family of ghosts and victims.

In intimate, beautifully allusive vignettes, Anderson guides readers through his youth, when he was beleaguered by the perpetual violence within his Catholic working-class neighborhood. Despite the turmoil, the author effectively captures moments of charm in the early years—e.g., when he discovered the mysteries of radio, which is all the family had until TV arrived in the ’80s. He also conveys his admiration for his bodybuilding, blues-loving father, whose job as a gardener and groundskeeper in the local cemetery was misunderstood at the author’s school, where he was considered a “gravedigger.” Gradually, the innocent depictions grow more extreme. As conditions between the British and Irish continued to deteriorate—the military had the ability to spy on the locals via radio, and there were frequent bomb scares and armed checkpoints—Anderson felt the peer pressure to act out more outrageously and to partake in the panacea of choice, alcohol. Then the author breaks the narrative into “Da’s Folks” and “Ma’s Folks.” The former delineates grandfather Joseph’s humiliating legacy of desertion from the British army during World War II and later self-drowning in 1963 (his wife followed him into the river some years later). In “Ma’s Folks,” Anderson explores the life of his maternal grandfather, Anthony, a navy man who, though pro-British, “changed his smuggling habits” when the Germans occupied Ireland. Simmering violence bubbles underneath the entire text, often boiling over, and Anderson ably plumbs the salvatory theme of how his peaceable father, despite his mysterious past, helped break the cycle of violence for his son. Though different in mood and tone, this thoughtful memoir will appeal to readers of Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, among other chronicles of the Troubles.

An impressively pensive, impressionistic work from an attentive writer.

Kirkus Reviews