**2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor.**
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 …
**2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor.**
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
