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The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
Aug. 16th, 2020 10:36 amThe Memory Police
3/5. Our narrator lives on an island where, periodically, a whole category of items like birds or pictures or, eventually, body parts is "forgotten" by the population, meaning all of its intellectual and emotional valence is gone. The Memory Police enforce this forgetting against those few who can remember.
Literary fantasy in translation from the Japanese. Literary fiction books about a person who is a novelist and whose thematically significant manuscript is excerpted throughout are a dime a dozen, which I know even though I read like three lit fic books a year. This one is fine, if prone to all the usual annoyances of this sort of thing – being way more interested in what things mean than in the things themselves, centrally. From that perspective, I suppose this whole setup is the literary fiction version of horror. Nothing is worse for this genre, after all, than removing the semantic meanings of objects. If a bird doesn't mean freedom anymore than my God, is it even worth talking about.
3/5. Our narrator lives on an island where, periodically, a whole category of items like birds or pictures or, eventually, body parts is "forgotten" by the population, meaning all of its intellectual and emotional valence is gone. The Memory Police enforce this forgetting against those few who can remember.
Literary fantasy in translation from the Japanese. Literary fiction books about a person who is a novelist and whose thematically significant manuscript is excerpted throughout are a dime a dozen, which I know even though I read like three lit fic books a year. This one is fine, if prone to all the usual annoyances of this sort of thing – being way more interested in what things mean than in the things themselves, centrally. From that perspective, I suppose this whole setup is the literary fiction version of horror. Nothing is worse for this genre, after all, than removing the semantic meanings of objects. If a bird doesn't mean freedom anymore than my God, is it even worth talking about.
