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What Members Thought
A really good premise: things disappear and all knowledge or memory disappear with them. The Memory Police makes sure they do. The pacing of the story never changes, except at the very end, where the plots speeds up, and the reader decides what the ending means.
May 30, 2021
Sunflower
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
e-books,
fiction-read-2021
This book is stunning. In both senses that we use this word. The concept is original, but invites comparisons as the reader tries to come to terms with this dystopian and frankly weird idea- while reading I was thinking Kafka vs Haruki Murakami, while I see that other readers mention Orwell.
Imagine a place where you wake up in the morning to find something has disappeared. Something you took for granted like flowers, or books. You have to dispose of any that you have and after that you can't bri ...more
Imagine a place where you wake up in the morning to find something has disappeared. Something you took for granted like flowers, or books. You have to dispose of any that you have and after that you can't bri ...more
Dual competing narratives that slowly diminish to loss, but I had a difficult time of the suspension of disbelief that it took so long for the story to get to books holding memories and the prerequisite book burning.
I only gave this one 3 stars because, while it was really well written, I just found it unrelentingly bleak and I just was not in the mood for that, I guess.
Oct 18, 2020
Kemlo
rated it
liked it
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review of another edition
Shelves:
fiction,
scifi-and-fantasy
I loved Ogawa's The Housekeeper and The Professor, and so I was looking forward to reading this book. It starts out interestingly enough, with a story within a story, and there's a mysterious premise to explore: memories of objects are being erased, ordinary things and people are disappearing from the island day by day, and no one knows why. The militaristic Memory Police, the mandatory burning of "forgotten" (and therefore forbidden) objects, and the arrests of people who fail to "forget," all
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‘But [memories are] invisible, aren’t they? And no matter how wonderful the memory, it vanishes if you leave it alone, if no one pays attention to it. They leave no trace, no evidence that they ever existed.’
