Paperback, 274 pages
English language
Published Oct. 29, 2020 by Penguin Random House.
A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance.
On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.
When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.
A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new …
A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance.
On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.
When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.
A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.
This was well-written and I cared about the characters, but the broader theme could have used more.
I have more complicated feelings about this than I expected to, as taken as I was with “[b:The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain|46138677|The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain|Yōko Ogawa|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1650388340l/46138677.SX50.jpg|1888205],” a short story of Ogawa’s published about a decade after this novel was.
The prose often felt flat to me, and I wonder whether it's because -- at the risk of sharing too much and in an odd venue -- I've spent the pandemic feeling an increasing sense of derealization. I think this novel was doing something that I didn't appreciate until too close to the end, a feeling reinforced by reading “How ‘The Memory Police’ Makes You See,” a great review by Jia Tolentino. I’m also still learning to read deeply, and may still struggle with the stylistic choice to give a narrator a diegetic voice …
I have more complicated feelings about this than I expected to, as taken as I was with “[b:The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain|46138677|The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain|Yōko Ogawa|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1650388340l/46138677.SX50.jpg|1888205],” a short story of Ogawa’s published about a decade after this novel was.
The prose often felt flat to me, and I wonder whether it's because -- at the risk of sharing too much and in an odd venue -- I've spent the pandemic feeling an increasing sense of derealization. I think this novel was doing something that I didn't appreciate until too close to the end, a feeling reinforced by reading “How ‘The Memory Police’ Makes You See,” a great review by Jia Tolentino. I’m also still learning to read deeply, and may still struggle with the stylistic choice to give a narrator a diegetic voice that doesn’t resonate with me immediately.
I think it’s still a great testament to a book’s force that you know you’ll continue thinking about it and want to revisit it, even if you can’t speak glowingly of it right away.
A slow, eddying novel about living with change and forgetting the past. Not much happens, but i still found myself thinking a lot about this book and its quiet hopefulness.
I feel like this is a beautiful and evocative book, for someone whose life experiences are rather different from mine.
It's all about loss and love and memory, grief and acceptance and other deep themes, and it treats them in lovely skillful ways. But while I have of course experienced these things, being a person and all, the ways that the book deals with them is from a subtly and perhaps mysteriously different perspective than mine. Maybe the ideal reader is a woman, or from Japan, or just has a different relationship with the world than I do, in some subtler way.
Having said that, though, I don't begrudge the time that I spent reading it, and I certainly came away with some striking new images, if not any specific insights or resolution.
the concept itself is interesting but the story was a bit underwhelming
the concept itself is interesting but the story was a bit underwhelming
Even at its darkest, you can still find a glimmer of hope in the strangest of places when you've given up looking. Grasping onto things as if they won't change is so painful. Floating on the wave, allows you to survive albeit in a different way than expected.
Sem condição de escrever uma resenha agora, mas pelo amor de deus, leiam esse livro. Vai sair em português pela editora Estação Liberdade, e já tá em pré-venda.
Another example of a book's premise being far more interesting than the book itself. You live on an island where you wake up one day and something from your life has just vanished. The first incident in the book involves birds, so everyone woke up and suddenly the concept of "bird" holds no meaning. You don't remember what a bird was, you don't know what a bird is, all knowledge of "bird" is removed by the Memory Police. Holding onto past concepts like birds, flowers, calendars, is forbidden, and it's considered taboo to reminisce or talk about items that have been "disappeared". As the book progresses, the disappeared items take the form of increasingly important and valuable things, and while disoriented and discomfited, the people are expected and encouraged to take it in stride and move on.
Certain people are immune to this, where they retain all memories and knowledge …
Another example of a book's premise being far more interesting than the book itself. You live on an island where you wake up one day and something from your life has just vanished. The first incident in the book involves birds, so everyone woke up and suddenly the concept of "bird" holds no meaning. You don't remember what a bird was, you don't know what a bird is, all knowledge of "bird" is removed by the Memory Police. Holding onto past concepts like birds, flowers, calendars, is forbidden, and it's considered taboo to reminisce or talk about items that have been "disappeared". As the book progresses, the disappeared items take the form of increasingly important and valuable things, and while disoriented and discomfited, the people are expected and encouraged to take it in stride and move on.
Certain people are immune to this, where they retain all memories and knowledge of things that have been disappeared, and if discovered by the Memory Police, these people are taken away and never seen again. Our main character is not one of these people, but does hide away her editor as he is one of these people. Romance blooms as romance does in books like these, and the editors tries his best to make the main character remember things that had been lost and realize how awful things truly are.
It's a very dystopian novel, and one without any real satisfying answers or conclusion. We never find out who or what the Memory Police act on behalf of, or why these things are being removed. I gather the novel is about how complacency is a creeping, insidious beast (the things disappeared start out innocuous and easily missed and slowly ramp up in importance and meaning as the story progresses), and that people should never just accept things as they are, but honestly the book came off boring and incomplete. This would've had more meaning if we had more reason to care about the people and their fate.
Really strange book. Good characters, but in the end the story is so abstract and lacking any explanation that it was kind of a frustrating read. I appreciated the message (at least that I took away), though: the default/actionless path can be more dangerous than activism.
3 (rounded up to 4) stars. I loved the first half of the book, but it lost me a bit by the end.
Haunting and beautiful. I really enjoyed this, despite the persistent anxiety it caused me. The path the story took from curiosity, to resistance, to resigning acceptance was tragic. It's been a long time since I have felt this way about a story.
After being underwhelmed by Ogawa's collection of short stories, [b:Revenge|16032127|Revenge|Yōko Ogawa|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349818757l/16032127.SY75.jpg|6316882], I expected to feel the same about this one, though the premise intrigued me. The first half of this novel felt completely on the nose and I wasn't very impressed. Fortunately, Ogawa wrote a whole novel so I got to experience this one's back half which I found provocative and moving and delightfully shocking. I really liked it and I see where Ogawa gets her fans.
The premise may feel familiar but how the author goes about expressing the metaphysical problems of historical revisionism and state propaganda are effective and cunning. What felt like an extremely simplistic novel at first is only building a stable structure to leap from in the back half of the novel and I admit I needed the opening in order to take in what she has to offer as her authorial conclusion.
Dragging too long and bored as hell.
Haunting
