YOKO OGAWA - THE MEMORY POLICE

Image: book cover

This novel is about the disappearance of things and all associated memories of these things. The disappearances happen on an island. The narrator is a novelist. Novels eventually disappear. It’s an allegory. And I think one reason I didn’t connect with The Memory Police is because allegories have some stiff competition in the history of literature. As a literary form, they’ve been around for a long while. For whatever reason, I think contemporary allegorical stories (I’m thinking of Saramago right now) require some red hot prose style to enliven them. It could have been the translation, but I didn’t find the prose style of this novel all that compelling. Read, February 2020.