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Memory Wall: Stories

by Anthony Doerr (Goodreads Author)

4.19 of 5 stars 4.19 · rating details · 908 ratings · 230 reviews

From an award-winning and extraordinarily eloquent author whose "prose dazzles" (The New York Times Book Review) comes a second stunning collection.Set on four continents, Anthony Doerr's new stories are about memory, the source of meaning and coherence in our lives, the fragile thread that connects us to ourselves and to others. Every hour, says Doerr, all over the globe,...more

ebook, 256 pages

Published July 13th 2010 by Scribner

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Feb 16, 2011 Sue rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories, read-in-2011, favorite-authors, favorites

This is my first experience reading Anthony Doerr, but it will not be the last. I loved reading these stories. My reactions varied throughout from frustration to sadness to happiness to occasional fleeting moments of joy as I watched these people struggling with momentous choices or small, repeating incidents building in their lives. The concept of memory and it's place in our everyday lives is used from many different angles, effectively from my view.

To say much more would be to try to summari...more

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Dec 27, 2012 Marc rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This collection of short stories revolving around the themes of memory and how past experiences can both figuratively, and throughout the book even literally, be as tangible and at times more real than the world we inhabit today, is a breath of fresh air. Despite the protracted format, the author effortlessly packs each story with layers of complex characterization and beautiful narrative providing as much content and impact than most books twice the size. In the limited pages he works with, Doe...more

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Jan 12, 2011 Sue Russell rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: books-reviewed, short-stories, best-of-2010

Update: I'm thrilled that Memory Wall is one of three nominees for the Story Prize. Now I have to catch up with the others. Here's my prepress review from Library Journal.

Library Journal
Suppose you've entered the foreign territory of senile dementia and a surgical procedure could charge your brain's damaged neurons and make your memories available to you once again. That's the supposition behind "Memory Wall," the title story of Doerr's compelling new collection and the metaphorical underpinning...more

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Jan 05, 2011 Jacob rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

This book is filled with memorable characters, images and prose. It will make you happy and sad, occasionally both at the same time. It's clear the author cares a lot about everything and everyone, even animals.

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Sep 27, 2010 Crystal rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Disappointed in this book, and it came so highly recommended! :) I do have to say that his writing style is nice, I enjoy the simplicity and also the depth with his careful word choice. For my tastes, the style is slightly too abrubt, but just as I said, that is just my taste. He did a good job at making these characters come alive and without actually saying but showing exactly what they feel. I was disappointed though with the lack of direction that the stories seem to take. The only direction...more

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Apr 18, 2013 Avery Taylor rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Anthony Doerr is a god.

I probably wouldn't have picked up this book on my own---I'm not usually one to go for a lot of short story collections---except that I went to a live reading by Doerr at my university, in which he read the bonus story from the 2011 edition of MEMORY WALL, "The Deep". And it was something like part-scripture, part-science fiction for me. All poetry. I knew I had to buy the book.

The experience of reading Doerr's stories is somewhat spiritual, in a very earthy, humanizing w...more Anthony Doerr is a god.

I probably wouldn't have picked up this book on my own---I'm not usually one to go for a lot of short story collections---except that I went to a live reading by Doerr at my university, in which he read the bonus story from the 2011 edition of MEMORY WALL, "The Deep". And it was something like part-scripture, part-science fiction for me. All poetry. I knew I had to buy the book.

The experience of reading Doerr's stories is somewhat spiritual, in a very earthy, humanizing way. I feel like Doerr's stories in MEMORY WALL---which have a running theme of memory (hence the title, maybe?) and also of loss, these two things being intertwined in a very poignant way---are all really featuring a discussion on the human experience.

Reading Doerr's work is something like listening to a Wagner overture or watching one of those Planet Earth videos where the cameras go way down into the ocean and you kind of don't believe that this could possibly be the same Earth that you have lived on for your entire life. It's that same kind of "OH" moment where you sort of realize that you are actually alive and there are other people who are also alive and there are trees and insects and mountains and birds as well. I don't know if that actually explains the experience of reading Doerr's prose exactly right, but that's how it was for me. Enlightening, I guess. Like I kept having epiphanies, kept realizing and wondering and having all kinds of new ideas and insights dawning on me in different ways throughout the whole collection.

I was so amazed and thrilled by Anthony Doerr's attention to nature. Every single piece is full of the world in its natural state---whether that be the whales and sealife and the oceanism in "The Deep" or the title story "Memory Wall" which depicts naturalism through a more industrialized, suburban setting or in "The River Nemunas" which is full of river-based and Lithuanian scenery, even touching on nature with the characterization of a dog (named Mishap). Doerr finds so much beauty in the world, it's practically a shock that everything Doerr is describing is real. The Earth that Doerr talks about almost sounds like a fantasy world. And it's awesome.

Aside from "The Deep"---which I'll admit is my ultimate favorite even though it's only featured in the newer edition---I was also especially infatuated with "Village 113" and "The River Nemunas", which are sort of tied together by a river. All of the stories, actually, feel especially resonant with me. It almost seems unfair to try to choose favorites.

There's nothing really bad I can say about this collection of short stories. MEMORY WALL was literally life-changing for me. It opened my eyes and shook up my view on the world, not in a rude or jarring way, but instead in a slow and moving way. It was like somebody was finally telling me the truth for the first time ever. I would honestly and wholeheartedly recommend MEMORY WALL (and every other piece of literature that Anthony Doerr has ever written) to anyone and everyone. Truly. If everyone read this collection of stories, there would probably be world peace or something.

This book is God. (less)

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Jan 20, 2013 Linda rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories-or-novellas

Our whole lives are based on memories good and bad, learned skills or lost skills, remembering or forgetting. This is what Doer writes about. One story is futuristic in that lost memories can be retrieved and put into a capsule that an alzheimer's patient can look at over and over again. The memory capsules become drugs stolen and sold on the black market. There is also the story of a woman who was rescued as a teenager from being sent to a concentration camp. As she begins to die she questions...more

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Oct 27, 2012 Eric rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Both individually and collectively, the intensely moving stories of Memory Wall are transfixing and haunting, and lead us to the deepest meditations on time, memory, and self, to elusive intimations of the individual’s place in what may be nested worlds, nested realities. They lead us, at once painfully and beautifully, to contemplation of our last ends—not in a macabre sense, but in ways that make us aware of the mysteries of existence. Luis Bunuel’s quote in the epigraph – “Memory is what make...more

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Apr 03, 2012 Kirstie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is the first novel I have read by Anthony Doerr and I have to say that I really enjoyed his writing style. He has a really interesting sense of language and metaphor. This collection reminded me a little bit of Charles Baxter's Believers collection as it is really a novella and some other short stories. Both the novella and the short stories focus on memory and the way that memories are lost and found and affect everything else about our choices and the way we perceive the world. The charac...more

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Nov 11, 2011 Peter rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This collection was a pleasant surprise. I was familiar with Doerr as a writer before I read it, but I had not read anything he'd written. I remember friends recommending "The Shell Collector" when it first came out, but I never got around to reading it. Later I encountered a story of his in an anthology, but I must have been distracted because I can't remember ever finishing that story. Now I am kicking myself for not reading Doerr sooner. His fiction is a treat. These stories are not happy sto...more

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Oct 05, 2011 Gayle rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I want to marry Anthony Doerr. Oh, wait, I'm already married. Then I'll have to do the next best thing: read everything else he's written, because I love the company of his mind, love traveling through his continents, inspecting with his creations the symbols and shards of memory that form a life and its contingencies. Doerr's tight writing paradoxically evokes whole worlds of culture, time, history, and real, breathing characters. We go to Africa, Lithuania, Germany, Wyoming, China in this coll...more

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Feb 25, 2011 Storyville App rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Anthony Doerr is the author of four books, The Shell Collector, About Grace, Four Seasons in Rome, and Memory Wall (Scribner, 2010) from which “The River Nemunas” is taken. Doerr’s short fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories. He has won the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and other awards. In 2007, Granta placed Doerr on its list of 21 Best Young American Novelists. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho with his wife and two sons.

Doerr had...more Anthony Doerr is the author of four books, The Shell Collector, About Grace, Four Seasons in Rome, and Memory Wall (Scribner, 2010) from which “The River Nemunas” is taken. Doerr’s short fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories. He has won the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and other awards. In 2007, Granta placed Doerr on its list of 21 Best Young American Novelists. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho with his wife and two sons.

Doerr had this to say about writing “The River Nemunas:” A few years ago, I was asked by WildAid, and the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation in the UK, to write a short story about an endangered species. The idea was that a bunch of writers from all over the world would each pick a different species, contribute them to a book, and the book would be sold to help fight the illegal wildlife trade.

I figured lots of writers would go for cute, photogenic animals: pandas, chimps, polar bears. So as soon as I saw sturgeon—a huge, mysterious, ugly fish—on a list of threatened species, I knew I had it.

I was writing a book about memory at the time (now titled Memory Wall), trying to use fiction to ask questions about how fragile memory can be, and somehow the sturgeon—particularly the Baltic sturgeon—seemed to fit perfectly. Sturgeon have been around for about 200 million years, and during that time their morphology has hardly changed. Individual sturgeon have lived for 100 years, grown 20 feet long, and reached 4,000 pounds; they seem to me to be visitors from some ancient time, as if they don’t quite belong here in our era of Wal-Marts and airport fast food. They’re abiders, survivors, able to eat anything, live in fresh and saltwater, and exist in subarctic and subtropical environments; they outlasted the dinosaurs.

And now we’re wiping them out.

I thought it would be interesting to transplant an orphan into an old place, steeped in human memory, and see if I could get her into contact with an even older memory: a last, mythical sturgeon.

Incidentally, a few readers have since written to me to tell me they think this story is an argument for the existence of God. Is it? I have absolutely no idea.
(less)

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Jan 19, 2011 Anne Broyles rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Like most writers, I read constantly, voraciously, inhaling books the way I scarfed down bags of Red Vines when I was a kid. I briefly savor the last pages of one book, ready to move on to the next offering on my shelf. Some books grab me so that I don’t want to shift loyalty from one author, one title, one world, to the next. Anthony Doerr’s MEMORY WALL is the rare book that I could almost begin again, start to finish, minutes after I completed the first reading. I will hold off because I read...more

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Dec 07, 2010 Alins rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Oct 12, 2010 Elaine Burnes rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Extraordinary! I know Doerr from reviews of science books he does for the Boston Globe. There are six stories in here, not all short. One fell completely flat for me--a young couple slogs through the quicksand of infertility in typical litmag fashion--but the rest are amazing enough to not cost any star points! The title piece and last one, Afterworld, really make you blink after and think, "What just happened?" The theme of memory is woven through each, he sprinkles science throughout (a couple...more

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Sep 04, 2010 Stacy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: magical, stylee

Tony Doerr knocks it out of the park with this one. His writing is achingly beautiful, at every level. Doerr chooses the perfect words, crafts sentences that make your heart feel too big for your chest, and repeatedly surprises--repeatedly offers up the thing that's both unexpected and exactly right.

The stories are magical in that they each contain something not-quite-of-this world: a memory machine, an epileptic ability to connect across time and space, an impossible sturgeon. It's not flying-...more

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Jul 17, 2010 Jill rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Aldous Huxley once famously said, “Every man’s memory is his private literature.” In this luminous collection of short stories (including an 83 page novella), Anthony Doerr probes the fragility and endurance of memory, in locales that vary from South Africa to Hamburg…from Lithuania to Wyoming…and from the heinousness of the Holocaust to an immediate dystopian future.

This masterful collection is bookmarked by an opening and an ending story with two diverse elderly women as key protagonists. The...more Aldous Huxley once famously said, “Every man’s memory is his private literature.” In this luminous collection of short stories (including an 83 page novella), Anthony Doerr probes the fragility and endurance of memory, in locales that vary from South Africa to Hamburg…from Lithuania to Wyoming…and from the heinousness of the Holocaust to an immediate dystopian future.

This masterful collection is bookmarked by an opening and an ending story with two diverse elderly women as key protagonists. The title story, Memory Wall, presents the elderly Alma, who lives in South Africa where she undergoes periodic “harvesting” of memories, stored on a series of numbered cartridges. By “hooking herself up”, she is able to recreate experiences to stave off her worsening dementia. She falls victim to a criminal and his accomplice “memory hunter” who attempt to rummage through these cartridges to find the location of a rare and lucrative gorgon fossil – one that will be the ticket to the good life that has been denied them. The young accomplish muses, ”Dr. Amnesty’s cartridges, the South African Museum, Harold’s fossils, Chefe Carpenter’s collection, Alma’s memory wall – weren’t they all ways of trying to defy erasure? What is memory anyway? How can it be such a frail, perishable thing?”

The ending story also focuses on an elderly woman – in this case, Esther, an orphan and an epileptic, who was spared the fate of her many close friends in Birkenau. Now in her early 80s and living in suburban Cleveland, her seizures are getting worse and she returns again and again in her mind to poignant, nightmarish memories of her times in ravaged Hamburg, as she relives her survivors guilt. As he watches her deterioration, her grandson Robert reflects, “Every hour…all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during the same hour, children are moving about, surveying territory that to them is totally new.”

As in most short story collections, each reader will likely have his or her favorites. One of mine is the fable-like Village 113; the Three Gorges Dam is about to be built, submerging a village and forcing its inhabitants to relocate. The tale is relayed by seed keeper, whose engineer son is spearheading the project. Doerr writes, “Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it is a village slated to be inundated.” The seed keeper and the schoolteacher are quite literally drowning in memories.

Each of Anthony Doerr's well-crafted stories focuses on the most important things in life: birth, death, survival, solace, but most of all the memories.(less)

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Apr 15, 2013 Kait rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I decided to buy a copy of Anthony Doerr’s “Memory Wall” after having the privilege of hearing him read from his book for a class I’m taking at BYU. Doerr’s fantastic presentation and ability to read aloud and connect with his audience first got me interested in his writing. He is a serious author and takes his work seriously, but he didn’t come across stuffy or pretentious, like some authors do. His reading was impressive, but his written work is even better. In “Memory Wall” he introduces the...more I decided to buy a copy of Anthony Doerr’s “Memory Wall” after having the privilege of hearing him read from his book for a class I’m taking at BYU. Doerr’s fantastic presentation and ability to read aloud and connect with his audience first got me interested in his writing. He is a serious author and takes his work seriously, but he didn’t come across stuffy or pretentious, like some authors do. His reading was impressive, but his written work is even better. In “Memory Wall” he introduces the theme of memory as he quotes Luis Bunuel on the opening page “… Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without possibility of expression is not really and intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.”

The theme of memory is woven through each short story: A young boy in South Africa comes to possess an old woman’s secret, a piece of the past with the power to redeem a life; a teenage orphan moves from Kansas to Lithuania to live with her grandfather and discovers a world in which myth becomes real; a women who escaped the Holocaust is haunted by visions of her childhood friends in Germany, yet finds solace in the tender ministrations of her grandson. I loved every short story included in “Memory Wall”, but the one that really resonated with me was “The Deep”.

Doerr’s character development and meticulous descriptions really captivated me and form a deep connection with the characters. The description he gave of Ruby: “Fire for her hair, Christmas for her birthday, a drunk for a dad”, created such a strong impression of her and her personality as a, “skinny, spellbinding girl”. Ruby’s character—with her daydreams of gorgeous, extravagant parties and far away places—seemed to represent a type of hope in a world of serious, dark depression. The repeated phrase, “the world goes to Hades and babies are still born” represents the underlying idea of the continuity and optimism.

Doerr explores the grandeur of life and as the San Francisco Chronicle put it, “lingering over the details of individual lives and suggesting the enormity of those billion things contained therein—mysterious, mournful, and lovely as they are.” I feel privileged to have met Anthony Doerr—a true writer and inspiration--and strongly recommend his work.(less)

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Jan 29, 2012 V. rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"Memory Wall" is a pretty extraordinary collection of short stories that will haunt well beyond the moment you finish the book. Anthony Doerr's vivid prose creates indelible images and remarkable characters. Women are the protagonists in many of the stories, with cultural references ranging from South Africa, to Asia, to Lithuania, to Middle America.

As the title suggests, the stories relate to the theme of memory - its transience, its preciousness, its fallibility. We treasure our memories, and...more

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Oct 01, 2011 Barksdale Penick rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Funny how perceptions can differ. The title of this book is drawn from the opening short story, so it seems reasonable to assume that to the author (or publisher) it is the strongest tale in the book, but it was the one in the collection I did not enjoy. It had a science fiction element to it, and I can't easily enjoy such a tale. But I really enjoyed the rest of the stories, in the wildly varied settings, Germany and Ohio in one, Kansas and Lithuania in another, China, Korea, South Dakota. And...more

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Apr 06, 2011 Kim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I agree with Katie and Becky that this is a beautifully written book that is hard to review. It is a collection of 6 stories which all have something to do with memory. The stories really pulled me in emotionally and I felt something like wistful longing or melancholy or something when I was reading them. My least favorite story was the first one, "Memory Wall" and it almost convinced me to stop reading. But I am glad I kept with it because I really enjoyed the rest of the book.

My favorite stor...more

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Apr 03, 2013 Becky rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: challenge-books

I enjoyed this collection of short stories. I love the concept of exploring memory and its role in our lives. Given how pervasive memory is, it's no surprise it can be addressed with a wide variety of characters and stories. What's so incredible is how well Doerr writes such a variety of stories, making you feel as though you're in these locations - different countries, different time periods, different characters, genders and ages, all in 7 short stories. I liked every one although my favorites...more

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Jun 16, 2012 Maiann Good rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I loved this book and his writing. He keeps the short stories gently connected thematically through symbolic examples he chooses to involve in each. Children, parents, memories, marriage, travelling, and more all play a roles with different hues as he builds a glimpse of each characters world. Each story is separate but connected and inspires thought. I love how he writes, how he describes what the character is feeling, seeing, smelling, touching in such a seemingly effortless, flowing manner re...more

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Jul 25, 2011 Larry Hoffer added it · review of another edition

Wow. This book really knocked me out. The six stories in Anthony Doerr's fantastic collection each deal with memory--what memories (and their loss) mean to us, how they move us and how conscious we are in the creation of new memories. (A character in the first story says "Remember a memory often enough and you can create a new memory, the memory of remembering.")

Each story has a wholly different premise and different main characters, and takes place in a completely difference place and time, fro...more

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Aug 27, 2011 Chris Blocker rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: first-reads

*Received from Goodreads' First Reads program*

In its short existence, there have been many masters of the short story. Flannery O'Connor. Anton Chekhov. Raymond Carver. Jorge Luis Borges. Some of them were writers of larger works, but we tend to remember them best for their short pieces. Ambrose Bierce. Stephen Crane. Zora Neale Hurston. Eudora Welty. John Cheever. Many of these writers belonged to a different era, a time when short stories were appreciated, even revered. Guy de Maupassant. Edga...more *Received from Goodreads' First Reads program*

In its short existence, there have been many masters of the short story. Flannery O'Connor. Anton Chekhov. Raymond Carver. Jorge Luis Borges. Some of them were writers of larger works, but we tend to remember them best for their short pieces. Ambrose Bierce. Stephen Crane. Zora Neale Hurston. Eudora Welty. John Cheever. Many of these writers belonged to a different era, a time when short stories were appreciated, even revered. Guy de Maupassant. Edgar Allan Poe. O. Henry. But some have continued to captivate our interests in recent years. Alice Munro. Amy Hempel. Anthony Doerr.

Is it perhaps a bit premature to add Anthony Doerr's name to this list of greats? Perhaps. But I have little doubt that given a little perseverance by the author, and time, Doerr will be one of those writers we think of when we consider the short story. He is a true talent, with writing that is natural and a voice that is rich.

Each story in Memory Wall is unique. Doerr is able to transport the reader from a semi-dystopian South Africa to an aquarium in 1914 Detroit without a hiccup in skill. Along the way, the reader visits contemporary China, a magical, yet dilapidated village in Lithuania, WWII era Germany, as well as Wyoming and Korea. No matter the setting, it is as if Doerr has entered his story and walked around in it, observing every important detail. He has such a great sense of space that the settings come to life.

Fortunately, Doerr's talent does not end with place. His stories and characters are just as vibrant as the worlds they are dropped into. Every one of these stories is tangible, empathetic, and moving—almost literally moving; often it felt as though the page had a rhythm, in and out, swaying gently in the fabric of the author's carefully woven tales.

Anthony Doerr's Memory Wall is nearly a perfect collection. It is a real spectacle and well worth the time it takes to read, not just once, but over and again.

Favorites: “Procreate, Generate”, “Afterworld”, “Memory Wall”, “The Deep”

Note: The paperback edition includes a seventh story not included in the original publication. While in many short story collections, stories that are added in later editions are often “throw aways”, this is not the case with this one. “The Deep” is wonderful and worth owning. It felt as if it belonged in this collection; it was just a little late showing up.(less)

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Aug 02, 2010 Bill rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I always love collections of short stories with a uniting theme. This was a really sweet collection with stories set all around the world, all connected by their common element of beautiful meditations on the theme of memory. The rather amazing title story a surreal tale set in South Africa, wherein an old Caucasian woman's memories are being recorded onto small cartridges in an ill-fated attempt to stave off her dementia and loss of memory. Meanwhile, the memories are being clandestinely stolen...more I always love collections of short stories with a uniting theme. This was a really sweet collection with stories set all around the world, all connected by their common element of beautiful meditations on the theme of memory. The rather amazing title story a surreal tale set in South Africa, wherein an old Caucasian woman's memories are being recorded onto small cartridges in an ill-fated attempt to stave off her dementia and loss of memory. Meanwhile, the memories are being clandestinely stolen by a brutal African man seeking a secret buried in her memory that will lead him to a priceless archeological find. Ultimately, the young boy he's using for his plot manages to use the secret to bring about a stunning redemption. The O. Henry Prize winning Village 113 chronicles the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the relocation of the residents of all the Asian villages that will be flooded following its completion, and the emotional struggles of a seed-keeper who is striving to maintain the memories of her village, and whose son is overseeing the dam project. Afterworld draws together a dying Holocaust survivor and her 20-year old grandson as she suffers through a series of seizures which precipitate visions of her wartime German childhood girlfriends. As the grandson listens to and records her memories for his thesis, he is gradually submerged into his own memories of growing up under the loving and nurturing influence of the old woman, and both are transformed by the power their memories of the past exert over their present and future lives. And my personal favorite, the brief but stunningly beautiful The Demilitarized Zone juxtaposes a young man's stark and luminous letters home from Korea with the disintegration of his parent's marriage (of which he is blissfully unaware.) The young man's letters, filled with amazing descriptions of his surroundings, most particularly of the native birds he observes, frequently left me catching my breath!

These startling and gorgeous stories are clearly the product of a gifted mind, one whose other works I fully intend to look into.(less)

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Mar 23, 2011 Joy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011

The title story and the final story ("Afterworld") are stunningly beautiful and moving. Both are long (85 and 65 pages, respectively), center around an elderly woman's memories as she approaches the end of her life, and feel almost novelistic in scope. Doerr's ability to articulate the commonplace events that make up a life were so beautiful it made me jealous, like in this quote from the final story: "Gerda Kopf says, 'You hear stuff like your whole life passes in front of your eyes. But it's n...more

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Mar 27, 2012 Carita rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories

Anthony Doerr's poignant "Memory Wall" consists of six stories of varying length. The opening title story is the longest at over 80 pages, a low-key sci-fi tale that takes place in South Africa, and it exemplifies how a well-written story can pass through several different point of views and only grow in strength as it moves along. It is an excellent intro to a book that ponders on memory, memories and what it means to remember - or not remember as is sometimes the case.

The second story, "Procre...more Anthony Doerr's poignant "Memory Wall" consists of six stories of varying length. The opening title story is the longest at over 80 pages, a low-key sci-fi tale that takes place in South Africa, and it exemplifies how a well-written story can pass through several different point of views and only grow in strength as it moves along. It is an excellent intro to a book that ponders on memory, memories and what it means to remember - or not remember as is sometimes the case.

The second story, "Procreate, Generate", was the only one that didn't particularly move me in any way. It felt strangely jarring after the first story, and out of place among the rest (although I admit that a second read may change my mind). I never got quite close enough to the characters, in part because of the subtlety of the writing; tumultous events and almost-events were delivered in an understated manner that, rather than accentuating the importance of what was happening, resulted in keeping me at an arms length.

But the other stories - "Village 113", the rather short "The Demilitarized Zone", "The River Nemunas" and the breathtaking "Afterworld" - all captured and held my interest and offered many moments of insight, wonder and sorrow. "Village 113" contains some of the most beautiful imagery in the book while telling the tale of an elderly seed-keeper woman whose village in China is doomed to disappear under water when a dam is built. Here memory is something that exists not only in humans but also in our land, in the places where generation after generation has lived and died. What happens to it all when we no longer have access to it? The same can be asked about a person: what happens when we no longer remember where we come from, who we are, those we have loved? I was often invited to regard my own relationship to memory, and I do so love it when a book makes me reflect.

The stories are also beautifully arranged in a way that sometimes lets the last lingering traces of one to live on in the next, not as an unchanging thread but as a deepening realization, an understanding that's transformed as we see it in light of different circumstances. For instance,

WARNING: The following paragraph contains possible spoilers, though nothing major.

in "Village 113" the main character stands in the river that the dam will turn into a lake and she thinks, "More than anything, I'll be sad to see the speed go out of the water." And in the next story we are drifting in a boat in the River Nemunas, with 15-year-old Allison who reflects, "A river never stops. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, forgetting, sleeping, mourning, dying - the rivers are still running." I don't know if it was intentional on the author's part, but reading the notion that a river never stops while having just seen that sometimes rivers do stop was... well, it was like coming a full circle in my mind and then falling into the vastness in the centre. I was brought to touch my memories of what I'd read before.

BREATHE EASY: No further spoilers ahead.

Doerr handles the many facets of memory with respect, curiosity and grace, approaching his theme through the eyes of characters diverse in age, geography and cultural background. Part of the richness of the collection comes from that: we are in South Africa, we are in China, we are in North America, we are in Lithuania. We are never far from loss, never more than a hair's breadth from death, and to me that's what makes this book worthwhile (and worth recommending). "Memory Wall" speaks about impermanence, and does not gloss over the much-avoided fact that none of us will be here forever, or even for very long. And Anthony Doerr does so without preaching, without scare tactics; showing rather than telling, with nothing but good storytelling and his fine writing.(less)

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Feb 04, 2011 Katina rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011

Phenomenal. Still reeling from its awesomeness.

When I finished this book, I remained stuck in a sort of trance state, sitting in my living room, but traveling through the worlds that Doerr created. I even lived through a particularly crowded and harrowing commute home without even flinching because I was so rapt by this book.

This collection of short stories was so vivid - the last one especially. Without giving too much away, its exploration of epilepsy and memories, practically time travel, m...more

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Aug 22, 2010 Andrea rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction-general, read-2010, short-stories

Of the five stories here, four out of six really resonated with me: Memory Wall; Procreate, Generate; The River Nemunas; and Afterworld. Doerr writes beautifully, in a mesmerizing way that really pulled me in to these locations, these situations, these characters. Voices, thoughts, and emotions of the characters all felt really tangible, and relateable. While his reflections on memory were occasionally transparent, for the most part the stories reflected differently and interestingly on how we m...more

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About Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr is the author of four books, The Shell Collector , About Grace , Memory Wall and Four Seasons in Rome . Doerr’s short fiction has won four O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. He has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the...more

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Books by Anthony Doerr

Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World

State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America

The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories

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Quotes from Memory Wall

“To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.” — 19 people liked it

“Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.” — 7 people liked it

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Memory Wall: Stories

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