The author's formative years in an environment of war and faith shaped his life and showed the binds that tie a family together. I enjoyed this, as it was written in a way that anyone unfamiliar with the history of Northern Ireland can feel invested in it.

*Many thanks to Darran Anderson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NetGalley for arc in exchange for my honest review.*
A memoir that links family history with the history of the place where the author and his family lived. An engaging read in which Mr Anderson describes the life in Northern Ireland through his family's history.

‘Inventory’ is a cunning memoir that reveals the binding roots of familial structure by exploring the darker recollections of war, faith, and art. The intelligence of the language provides nourishment for the book, and the landscapes depicted throughout the pages were mysterious and inviting.

Darran Anderson initiates his collection by reflecting about his upbringing in Derry (whether you call the city Derry or Londonderry depends on your politics the Derry Girls tell us) in 1984. I was intrigued and curious about Darran’s upbringing-he tries for live a normal childhood, but can’t escape the violence and bloodshed of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

The remainder of the memoir is a balancing act where Darran divulges in his families legacy. The IRA struggles are sporadic and engaging, but Anderson reveals quite a bit more, and although we’re told that Ireland was neutral during wwII, we can’t discredit the thousands of Irish citizens that served under the British allied armies. Anderson reflects on this subject with a cold voice while describing his grandfather.

"Inventory" by Darran Anderson is a nonfiction work about the author's experiences and life in Northern Ireland. While the book is nonfiction, the language Anderson uses is more reminiscent of a literary work in that the pages are filled with beautiful imagery, well-developed characters, descriptive setting, and conflict. "Inventory" highlights the power of stories, memory, and family history and how the realities of a place like Northern Ireland shape one's life and future. I did have to stop periodically to look up information about the historical events described in the book to understand what was going on. Overall, this is a really excellent work and worth the read.

Having grown up in an Irish border town surrounded by friends and family who suffered hardship during the worst of the so-called 'Troubles', there was much in Darran Anderson's memoir I could relate to. The memory of playing on abandoned wastegrounds similar to Derry's "The Glen"; Army patrols; poking at the shells of burnt-out cars; even the notion of fool's gold, which like Anderson, I have a distinct memory of buying on a school trip to one of the north of Ireland's few museums.
There were other things too, other less comfortable things which resonated; like the male imperative to defend oneself through violence, the secret (and often unspoken) histories which are often embedded within our family trees.
Anderson takes a unique view of all of this, recognising that our lives are built around totems and objects which can connect our memories and act as gateways into our pasts. The pathways opened up aren't always easily travelled, and our associations with the objects that spawned them can sometimes sully our relationship with the world. Nevertheless, the act of getting there is important, and Anderson's book is an important guidebook in training oneself to do so.

I like the idea of mixing memoir with history and the author's journalistic pieces are some of my favorites. However this book did not attract my attention. I feel like it wanted to be more artsy, that it tried too hard to be cool or hipstery. Maybe people of the same background as the writer or the audiences of The New Yorker/ Harper's/ The Paris Review might like it.
As someone also working in marketing I'd put an excerpt in one of the mags above or somewhere similar or offer copies to famous celebrities with Instagram book clubs.

"How might it be possible to reconstruct a lost person? To thread bone onto soul and muscle onto bone and skin onto muscle without creating a monster or marionette. To rebuild a human being from photographs, documents, contradictory fragments of memories. The objects and impressions they left behind perhaps form a silhouette of negative space resembling a figure. A presence in the shape of an absence. Perhaps it is also worth establishing what first took people apart. To follow the unwinding thread."

Inventory is such a multifaceted work: it's part world history, part family history, part social history, part memoir. But beneath its diverse and eclectic interests, it's preoccupied by one essential thing: the past. And it is this preoccupation that gives the book's narrative its momentum. The past, in Inventory, is a slippery, unwieldy thing. Anderson does not uncover it so much as reconstruct it. Indeed, to a great extent the pasts discussed in this book have been buried: family members hesitate or refuse to share traumatic pasts, pasts are entirely erased with the tearing down of properties, people die and so too do their pasts. In response, Anderson tries to make sense of the gaps in his and his family's story. And throughout the book, he calls attention to his attempt to do so: he asks his mother for what she remembers, he sits down with his grandfather to record his stories, he seeks out microfilms of old newspapers to gather information. All of these things make Inventory feel like a project of making sense of the past.

But more than just a project, Inventory is a personal project. In many ways Anderson's attempt to make sense of his family's past is also an attempt to make sense of himself: his upbringing, his adolescence, his relationship to his forbears. And the way his personal project unfolds is in his taking inventory of the objects from his and his family's past.
"We'd fixate on the objects. Not just to play with but to inspect from every angle. We knew instinctively that all the objects found were invested, or had once been, with some kind of meaning."

There it is: Anderson takes inventory of these objects, holds up them to the light, because they mean or meant something to him; they are invested with something beyond their physical existence. The very structure of this book hinges on this fact, with each chapter titled after an object: a periscope, a torch, a football, a television, a shovel, an LP.

Beyond that, Anderson also examines his own past living during the tail end of the Troubles, from his life as a kid in Derry to his adolescence to his eventually leaving Northern Ireland. What I found especially striking about the more memoir-ish parts of Inventory is the haunting specificity of Anderson's writing. Lines like "I remember laughing with nerves, not for the last time, at the sight of trauma," or how at one point it "gradually dawned" on him that he couldn't go to sleep "because the nocturnal soundtrack of helicopters was no longer there. The silence of peace was deafening."

Anderson writes: "Time is the spreading of ink on a page wet with rain." If so, then Inventory is his attempt to reconstitute, in part at least, that seeping ink, to give it shape, illegible as it may be.

Thanks so much to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with an e-ARC of this via NetGalley!

Gripping memoir with beautiful, lyrical writing. In the past several years, memoir has become a favorite genre for me and I would highly recommend this to other genre fans.