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Loading... The Memory of Loveby Aminatta Forna
The storyline is amply available here on GR so I'll focus my comments on the writing style. Overall, the story is interesting and has several clever twists and connections (inter-connections to be more accurate). The tone is measured...extremely measured to the extent that I felt the book was somehow emotionally unavailable. And although the writing is largely flawless and at times teetering on lyrical, its ability to move me, to draw me in, did not occur. (  ) ming.l | Mar 31, 2013 |  This book has so much going for it. So much. So it's difficult to slap three stars on it and say “meh, it was okay.” Because it was more than okay, but it wasn't. And it was worth five stars, but it wasn't. What a confusing review. First off, let me say the second half of The Memory of Love is phenomenal. The story is strong, filled with suspense, tender moments, and those scenes that are hard to ever forget. The characters are interesting and their relationships leave the reader feeling both anxious and comforted. Well done. The pacing is great and almost everything seems to have purpose. The second half of the book is really, really, really exceptional. 4.5 stars. The first half is largely the opposite of the second. The characters meander through the story, every detail of their boring lives shared. As far as story or character development, very little happens. The details pour out page after minuscule-print page. It becomes a chore and that is not good news for any book, especially when it is the first two-hundred pages one must slog through. 3 stars. As I neared the end, I really began to love this novel. It was all coming together rather nicely. And then, it didn't pull through. Loose ends were left. Characters became irrelevant. There was no point to so much of the backstory. Essentially, this was a novel about Adrian and Kai and their relationship with one another and with Mamakay. That was the story. So why was so much time spent on Elias and Julius and Saffia? I realize there was somewhat of a “repetition of the cycle” motif, but it didn't fit together well enough to be necessary. And what was the whole thing with Agnes? Why was the reader asked to spend so much time trying to solve the mystery of Agnes if it wasn't relevant? It seems to me that either The Memory of Love needed to add considerable story to make it all fit together, or cut out all that was unnecessary. I vote for the latter. Aminatta Forna does so much right with this novel. The story is wonderful and the depiction of high-society Africa on the brink of modernization (yet so far from it) is incredibly refreshing. I wish this was a novel I could recommend to others, but in a world with so many other wonderful books it is not quite worth it in the end. My fingers are crossed that Forna will find the right balance the next time out. 3 stars. Okay, okay, 3.25, but in good conscience I cannot go any higher. 3.49 stars. (  ) chrisblocker | Mar 30, 2013 | An intriguing story of the connection between three people who change the life of Adrian,a psychologist who goe to Sierra Leone in the aftermath of the civil war to help victims of PTSD.The love stories were beautifully drawn but the book was spoilt for me with the epilogue. The ending did not ring true (  ) lesleynicol | Aug 19, 2012 | This story about Sierra Leone during and after the war is compelling, but didn't grip me as much as I would have liked it to. I could not really relate to the three main characters, all males, and often did not understand their choices. Unfortunately, this didn't make reading this book a very enjoyable experience. (  ) SimoneA | Jul 17, 2012 | And when he wakes from dreaming of her, is it not the same for him? The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against every morning until he can immerse himself in work and forget. Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love. – from The Memory of Love, page 185 - Sierra Leone is filled with survivors of a brutal civil war – people who are moving through the remains of their lives, traumatized by loss. Kai is a young surgeon working in the capital hospital and struggling with his own memories of a lost love and an incident he has buried deep within his heart. Elias Cole is an old man, dying in a hospital bed, and wanting to unburden himself of terrible choices he made, to re-write his own history and spin his story to his own advantage. Adrian is a British psychologist who has left his wife and daughter to come to Africa and help survivors to recover emotionally. Bound together by their own secrets, desires and one woman, these three men’s lives will become interwoven in ways none of them could ever have anticipated. Immersed in the novel are the stories of not just the characters, but of a whole country changed by war. Aminatta Forna explores the resilience of the human spirit, the fine line between truth and lies, betrayal, and the ethereal power of love in a novel which spans nearly two decades. People are blotting out what happened, fiddling with the truth, creating their own version of events to fill in the blanks. A version of the truth which puts them in a good light, that wipes out whatever they did or failed to do and makes certain none of them will be blamed. – from The Memory of Love, page 351 - Forna constructs her novel with three distinct narratives which move the reader back and forth from present time to when Sierra Leone was embroiled in civil war. The voice of Elias Cole is the echo behind the other stories. Here is a man who begins his narrative with his attraction to a married woman, but whose story changes as the reader begins to see the character through the eyes of others. Driven, competitive, and willing to do anything to advance his career, Elias is a man who represents the quiet support behind the scenes which allows evil to propagate. Adrian is a complex character – a man who is searching for something greater. He loves his child in England, but has grown distant from his wife. He is drawn to the people of Africa and wants to understand their torments. The last thing he expects to find, however, is love. How does a man whose task in life is to map the emotions, their origins and their end, how does such a man believe in love? – from The Memory of Love, page 362 - It was Kai, however, who I was most drawn to in this novel of loss. A young and gifted surgeon, a man whose job was to put back together the physically shattered lives of his patients, but whose own life was emotionally fragmented. My heart ached for Kai. I wanted to know what had happened to him…and Forna waits until the end of the novel to fully reveal his story. It is Kai’s character who brings the novel full circle, who links all the characters together. Close at hand a dog adds its voice to those of the others. Kai thinks of the day and the journey he now has before him. He does not lack the courage for it. No. Rather it was the courage to stay that had failed him. – from The Memory of Love, page 287 - The Memory of Love is a quiet novel which reveals the people of post-war Sierra Leone: a boy whose father was murdered, a man rebuilding his body and dreaming of marriage, a woman ready to reclaim her son born of a rape, a community strengthened by its collective memories and cultural ties. Forna’s writing is graceful, introspective, and beautifully rendered. The Memory of Love is a novel for those readers who enjoy literary fiction and works which examine African culture. It is a book about survival and the power of love to heal us. Highly Recommended. (  ) writestuff | Jun 24, 2012 |
 Forna’s characters weave in and out of each other’s lives, often with entirely unforeseeable and shocking consequences. They are so well drawn, and so universally authentic, that each time the narrative view switches from one to the other one almost longs for a convenient twodimensional caricature as light relief from possession. With whom can the reader most easily identify? Adrian, the English ingénu? Kai, the heroic surgeon who cannot see the green grass in the other field? Cole, the sell-out? Or Agnes — whose mind has quite rightly opted to walk rather than think about what she must endure? Forna’s intense research into surgery and psychiatry is as lightly worn as her ability to hide her own craft as a writer...Let us hope that it takes its place where it deserves to be: not at the top of the pile of “African Literature” but outside any category altogether — and at the top of award shortlists This is an ambitious project. Forna has written before about the power of storytelling to talk our lives into different shapes. Here she moves deftly between the enchantments of different narratives: the therapeutic, the confessional, the traumatic – flashbacks, nightmares, hauntings, fugue states where stories are lost or distorted beyond recognition and the sweetly joyous themes of new love, renewal, springing hope, second chances..... Forna understands that it is only by making patterns out of chaos that humans find the courage to continue living. And in this affecting, passionate and intelligent novel about the redemptive power of love and storytelling, she shows how it is done. Forna's book is set in the city at almost exactly that time – not long after the end of one of the bloodiest civil wars in modern African history – and she captures exactly the sense of numbed brutalisation that I saw first-hand in many places: in the eyes of former child soldiers who had been forced to mutilate and murder their parents, in the camps full of young girls raped and enslaved by the rebel forces, and abandoned by their families because of the "shame". I remember all too vividly trying to collect the horror stories that were those lives and the absolute inadequacy of my questions: "How did it feel…?" We like to talk about conflict resolution, and truth and reconciliation, in the context of such nationwide atrocity (the particular gruesome speciality of the war in Sierra Leone was the systematic amputation of limbs; queues were formed in front of drugged young men with machetes. But how do you really go about healing that kind of pain? That is one of the questions that Forna approaches with the utmost caution in an ambitious and deeply researched novel – and the answers she finds are never easy.
No descriptions found. Adrian Lockheart is a psychologist escaping his life in England. Arriving in Freetown in the wake of civil war, he struggles with the intensity of the heat, dirt and dust, and with the secrets this country hides. Despite the gulf of experience and understanding between them, Adrian finds unexpected friendship in a young surgeon at the hospital, the charismatic Kai Mansaray, and begins to build a new life. In the hospital Adrian encounters an elderly man, Elias Cole, who is reflecting on his past, not all of it noble. Recorded in a series of notebooks are memories of his youth, the optimism of the first moon landings, and the details of an obsession: Saffia, a woman he loved, and Julius, her fiery, rebellious husband. As their individual stories entwine across two generations in a country torn apart by repression and war, some distances cannot be bridged. It is the story of four lives colliding; a story about friendship, about understanding, absolution and the indelible effects of the past; about journeys and dreams and loss, and about the very nature of love.… (more) |
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RatingAverage: (4.09)
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