That Reminds Me
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That Reminds Me
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Narrated by:
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Kobna Holdbrook-Smith
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By:
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Derek Owusu
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
WINNER OF THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE 2020
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Anansi, your four gifts raised to nyame granted you no power over the stories I tell...
This is the story of K.
K is sent into care before a year marks his birth. He grows up in fields and woods, and he is happy, he thinks. When K is eleven, the city reclaims him. He returns to an unknown mother and a part-time father, trading the fields for flats and a community that is alien to him. Slowly, he finds friends. Eventually, he finds love. He learns how to navigate the city. But as he grows, he begins to realise that he needs more than the city can provide. He is a man made of pieces. Pieces that are slowly breaking apart.
That Reminds Me is the story of one young man, from birth to adulthood, told in fragments of memory. It explores questions of identity, belonging, addiction, sexuality, violence, family and religion. It is a deeply moving and completely original work of literature from one of the brightest British writers of today.
©2019 Derek Owusu (P)2019 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
"Heartbreaking, important and original." (Christie Watson, author of The Language of Kindness)
"Derek Owusu’s writing is honest, moving, delicate, but tough. Once you lock on to his words, it is hard to break eye contact. A beautiful meditation on childhood, coming of age, the now, and the media. This work is heartfelt." (Benjamin Zephaniah)
"Honest and beautiful." (Guy Gunaratne, author of In Our Mad and Furious City)
Derek Owusu is on the Granta list of young British authors for 2023 which is why I downloaded this book
The title of That Reminds Me suggests those ideas and memories which emerge randomly and jostle in your head. It’s a fitting title for this highly idiosyncratic and fragmentary novel about K (born like Derek himself of Ghanaian parents) from childhood to deeply troubled young man.
Owusu’s novel (which is more of a memoir) is extremely succinct (160 minutes listening only), and its fragmentary quality in its numbered and extremely fleeting paragraphs, each one dealing with one intensely vivid episode. His language is adventurous and striking with some powerful sections and some having the rhythms of poetry. There are times however when meaning is strangled.
The experiences which Owusu recreates are intensely visceral and graphic , such as his years in a foster home, his mother’s illness and his family’s tough life in 1990s Tottenham, his love for his baby brother, his feelings of alienation and self-loathing, his early sexual experiences, and his social and cultural struggles growing up.
Then there are the horrors of his mental deterioration and the periods of self-harming which are described in unflinching detail. At the end of the Audible recording there is a long list of contacts for help for listeners affected by this section. I don’t know whether this is in the book or just on audio, but I found that it detracted from the book, upsetting the balance of what is a child-man story, not one focussing exclusively on self-harm.
The narration by the Ghanaian actor Kobna Holdbrook-Smith is first class, totally in tune with the text, culture and voices.
Intriguing
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Gripping and fantastic
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stunning
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the text is poetic whilst also telling the story of man's life and struggles
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Immensely well written
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It should be noted that the printed version of this book has minor differences from the version in the audio here (notably 'African deities' for 'Greek deities' on p.93--I wonder which is Owusu's first thought and which his later revision here), but the text is substantially the same.
Prose poem performed brilliantly
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The bitter truth
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brillance
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