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The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa — a Dystopia to Send Shivers Even to George Orwell
“Memories are a lot tougher than you might think. Just like the hearts that hold them.”
Another random bookstore find! This is a sparse, dystopian novel that will stay with me for quite a while. The “book hangover” from this one lasted a long time, if you know what I mean!
Actually, the more you think about the book, and consider the structure — the hidden meanings, the references — the more you come to appreciate the craft and the care that went into writing it.
Not surprisingly, it was a finalist for the International Booker Prize, it and the author have received a crazy number of other literary awards, and it has been favorably compared to 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and others.
The basic plot is that, on an unnamed island, the unnamed narrator tells of the “disappearances” from the island of things like photographs, novels, even birds, and she explains how it’s the job of the Memory Police to find people who still remember — and eliminate them.
Or at least “disappear” them as well since it’s never really clear what happens to them once the Memory Police take them away.
That’s what’s so eerie and cool about this book: hardly any of the main characters are named (there’s “R”, her…
