Scan barcode
A review by corinnekeener
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa
4.0
We read and reviewed The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa for episode 60 of The Bookstore Podcast. You can listen to it at that link, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Somewhere in the middle of an ocean is an island where things keep disappearing. One day you have fruit, or perfume, or yo-yos, and the next you wake up knowing they need to be destroyed. By the end of the day you don't even know the word perfume ever existed.
There is a novelist living on this island, keeping her editor - a man who does not forget the items he is supposed to - in hiding from the Memory Police, and writing her latest novel as the disappearances continue. Interspersed throughout the book are excerpts from the book the novelist is working on, a sort of parallel story to The Memory Police that manages to be both a very good novel-in-novel (these are hard to pull off) and super scary.
This is a literary type of genre fiction. It moves slowly and does not delve into the mechanics or the why of the disappearances. In fact, attempting to piece together exactly how or why things work they way they do proves very confusing. I imagine anyone who has strong feelings about magic systems or world building might find this frustrating. But I really enjoyed the story. It was perfectly strange, sometimes pretty emotional, and comes to one of the most shocking endings I've read in some time.
Somewhere in the middle of an ocean is an island where things keep disappearing. One day you have fruit, or perfume, or yo-yos, and the next you wake up knowing they need to be destroyed. By the end of the day you don't even know the word perfume ever existed.
There is a novelist living on this island, keeping her editor - a man who does not forget the items he is supposed to - in hiding from the Memory Police, and writing her latest novel as the disappearances continue. Interspersed throughout the book are excerpts from the book the novelist is working on, a sort of parallel story to The Memory Police that manages to be both a very good novel-in-novel (these are hard to pull off) and super scary.
This is a literary type of genre fiction. It moves slowly and does not delve into the mechanics or the why of the disappearances. In fact, attempting to piece together exactly how or why things work they way they do proves very confusing. I imagine anyone who has strong feelings about magic systems or world building might find this frustrating. But I really enjoyed the story. It was perfectly strange, sometimes pretty emotional, and comes to one of the most shocking endings I've read in some time.