How to Restore a Timeline by Peter Counter
How to Restore a Timeline
by Peter Counter
House of Anansi, 2023; 260 pages; $22.99
Review by Henry Osborne
From the trigger warnings and spoiler alerts, the essays inside peter Counter’s How to Restore a Timeline inject the reader into a pop culture-infused exploration of community, karate, personal dedication, vacations, family relationships, memory, and how they’re all impacted by the author’s PTSD.
27 December 2006, a nineteen-year-old Peter Counter is on a cruise with his family. The ship docks in Limon, Costa Rica. While Counter’s mom and brother are away on a ziplining excursion, he and his father explore the town alone, eventually making their way onto a deserted pier where they hope to find a good ocean view. On the pier, a stranger holds them at gunpoint in an attempt to rob them, and after failing to produce any valuables (they both left their cash on the ship), the robber shoots Counter’s father through the chest and flees. Counter, bloody and exhausted, drags his wounded father back to the cruise ship where the onboard medical staff save his life.
Years later, Counter and his brother sift through piles of old home videos that they plan to compile, digitize, and gift to their parents. on the TV screen, a child Counter plays “shoot and explode,” a made-up game where he pretends to be shot and subsequently explode. Now living with the trauma of his father’s very real shooting, the once pleasant memory playing out on the TV transforms into something darker, infected by his lingering trauma.
The shooting is “the nucleus” of How to Restore a Timeline, the centre-thread of a spiderweb of stories, memories, glimpses, and dissections that gradually form a larger picture of Counter’s PTSD. It’s the frame for everything that is to come in the following essays, but it’s not the primary focus of the book. Instead, over the next twenty-nine essays, Counter explores how his PTSD seeps into every aspect of his life, gradually creating a “traumatic homogeny.” We see subtle changes, the alteration of memories, home videos, and music, and we also see big impacts, Counter’s isolation and pain, throughout.
How to Restore a Timeline is warm, sad, and contemplative. Language and detail are components that make it shine. The guts of this book are dark and painful, but it never wallows in victimhood. Rather, Counter explores the darkness of his PTSD with a measured, thoughtful, and honest eye. While the language occasionally straddles the edge between sharpness and self-indulgence, it rarely, if ever, slips over into the latter. The combination of Counter’s intelligent voice and the fun pop culture framing (spanning from Fallout 3 to Cat Stevens to Dragon Ball Z), makes for a heart-felt, humorous, and thoroughly stimulating set of essays that are not only fun to read, but feel like the author had fun writing.
If you’re interested in dark and unusual stories with sharp and clear writing, that skillfully wield humour, heart, and pop-culture, and that thoughtfully dissect pain and mental illness, then this constellation of essays will probably be for you. You should run then, dedicated reader, to your nearest bookstore. Shove your crinkled wad of cash into the palm of whatever underpaid employee is operating the cash register, and demand that they sell you this title. You’ll enjoy the journey, appreciate its beauty, and you’ll probably be liable to have a good time.