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Loading... The Memory Police: A Novel (original 1994; edition 2020)by Yoko Ogawa (Author)
Work InformationThe Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (1994)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Another beyond weird translated book with an interesting concept! Though I feel this book holds the reader at a distance, for example, none of the characters have names. A novelist lives in a place where occasionally things disappear from the island. One day it's birds. One day it's roses... Interspersed with a bit of a novel that the character was writing makes it a bit more interesting. I don't regret reading it, but wish I had liked the execution better. Any work where the main character is also an author stands on a tightrope and threatens to plunge into self-aggrandisement (looking at you [a:Stephen King|3389|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1362814142p2/3389.jpg]). But it works very well here, a novel about what happens when the process of defamiliarization menaces a community like a monster out of a b-movie. Other reviews for Ogawa's novel focus on the arbitrariness of the Memory Police's rules and the political connection to cruel and absurd laws today, but to me the fact that nature itself collaborated with the authorities was more horrifying. The authorities were merely agents of some natural force that imposed insane restraints and demanded people recontextualize and relearn through these painful fetters. Anyone who's had music lessons or been to a writer's workshop can sympathize. no reviews | add a review
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"On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, things are disappearing. First, animals and flowers. Then objects--ribbons, bells, photographs. Then, body parts. Most of the island's inhabitants fail to notice these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the mysterious 'memory police,' who are committed to ensuring that the disappeared remain forgotten. When a young novelist realizes that more than her career is in danger, she hides her editor beneath her floorboards, and together, as fear and loss close in around them, they cling to literature as the last way of preserving the past"-- No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)895.63Literature Literature of other languages Asian (east and south east) languages Japanese Japanese fictionLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Also, I was absolutely done with the main character when she risked everything for no reason by walking into the Memory Police headquarters (apparently without suffering any consequences though, so it's all excused I guess?) and somehow managed to ignore the repeated signs of an oncoming stroke in her friend the old man until the day he died of one (for context/contrast, she took the dog to the vet at the first sign of illness). I can understand unlikeable characters, but I cannot abide inconsistent or stupid ones, and the unnamed narrator of this book unfortunately happens to be both. In fact, she hardly qualifies as a main character for me because she takes a backseat in almost all the events that matter - she tells us what happens to her, what other people are doing (the old man does pretty much everything, for instance, when it comes to their rescue operation) carries on an icky affair with a married man she's hiding (contributing nothing whatsoever to the plot), and then just kind of fades away at the end. Good riddance, honestly. ( )