Scan barcode
A review by futurememory
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa
dark
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
What a claustrophobic novel. It was honestly hard to pick this back up at times because there's such an undercurrent of terror, underneath the matter-of-fact observations and prose.
This type of atmospheric science fiction definitely isn't for everyone. It's firmly a dystopian hellscape that deals more with the metaphorical, a specific kind of existential dread, the fear of disappearing, of becoming irrelevant, mortality, of what makes us human and what we can stand to lose. A death by a thousand cuts scenario. The Memory Police is surreal in a terse way. Its bombshells are made all the more horrifying by the numb acceptance of the inhabitants of the island.
Bleak and affecting.
If I had one critique, I think that the book-within-a-book can be distracting from the main novel. It does all come together nicely in the end, but whenever we diverted into that other novel, I was just chomping at the bit to get back to the main story.
This type of atmospheric science fiction definitely isn't for everyone. It's firmly a dystopian hellscape that deals more with the metaphorical, a specific kind of existential dread, the fear of disappearing, of becoming irrelevant, mortality, of what makes us human and what we can stand to lose. A death by a thousand cuts scenario. The Memory Police is surreal in a terse way. Its bombshells are made all the more horrifying by the numb acceptance of the inhabitants of the island.
Bleak and affecting.
If I had one critique, I think that the book-within-a-book can be distracting from the main novel. It does all come together nicely in the end, but whenever we diverted into that other novel, I was just chomping at the bit to get back to the main story.