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The Memory Police

A Novel

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The Memory Police

Written by: Yoko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder - translator
Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
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*** 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST ***
*** LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE AND THE 2020 TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD ***
*** NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR ***

A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor.

On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.

When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.

A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language. Dystopian Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction
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This book was great. Very well regarded and a good story. However, I did find the narration to be lacking due to the monotone of her voice.

great story, meh narration

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I found the book a bit difficult to understand for someone who is starting to read books for leisurely reading! I'll have to try listening to it again in a couple years to extract meanings that the author intended.

mysterious

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The Memory Police

This is a many layered tale but only two of the layers are obvious. While it sounds like science fiction sometimes to me it reads more like a gentle reminder of the reality of having some form of dementia. I'm very familiar with this as I just lost my Mom and she had dementia with Lewy Bodies. She died from something unrelated but after caregiving her for over five years this book hit me like a brick.

The writing is very cuturally Japanese and I love it's slow flow and simplicity. It's one of the reasons I'm a real fan of Japanese literature. Putting a dystopian twist on this for me is genius and even if it wasn't the intent of the author to be a story with a layer about truly forgetting it still resonated with me. The slow but yet more frequent disappearances of objects are unsettling and the progression of what you suspect is coming is artfully done.

Yoko Ogawa is wonderful and I hope she has a lot more stories because I want to read or listen to them all even if they make me cry. The narrator was perfect. Never letting the more unsettling parts make her reading more histrionic she kept with her more nuanced performance. This may well become a new favourite for me.

Dystopian? Possibly

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I loved the author's imagery, the personification of items, the way she describes things that have disappeared from people's memories before giving them names. However, I felt the premise of the book might have been better done as a narrator, rather than in first person. Things that would have been known by a narrator but not by someone who has "lost" memories.

Beautiful imagery

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Not worth reading all the way through. There was so much potential for the book, it just ended abruptly and feels unfinished

The ending was disappointing

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