BOOK REVIEW: THE MEMORY POLICE BY YOKO OGAWA

I N C L U D E S  A F F I L I A T E  L I N K S

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Title: The Memory Police
Author: Yoko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder (translator)
Published: 1994
Language: English (translated from Japanese)
Pages: 274
Rating: 2/5

Summary:
Set on an island where things and people keep disappearing, both in physical form as well as from people's memories, a novelist realises her editor doesn't forget like the rest, making him a target for the dreaded Memory Police, so she decides to help him by hiding him.

Review:
This was an odd book. I picked it up because the concept sounded amazing, and it is, but in the end I don't know how well it was executed.

The biggest themes in this book are oppression, loss and the power of memory and remembering. It was really interesting to see how the island where the story is set slowly changes and how different that experience is for those who remember and those who don't, because how can you fight against authoritarianism if you don't even remember the past?

That being said, I don't really know how I feel about this. It was a lot more boring than I thought it was going to be. It is quite a slow and vague book and in the beginning I was totally okay with that, but it never really picked up and in doesn't ever really become any clearer, it almost goes in the other direction where everything becomes a blur. Sometimes, I think not revealing everything in a book can be fantastic, but this reveals nothing towards the end and I just found it really frustrating. I wanted to know what was really going on and we get zero answers.

The writing was okay, it had some beautiful parts, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. There are also parts in here where we read parts of the novelist's manuscript that she's working on and I didn't really like those bits. I also didn't really ever feel that connected to the characters, as to me, they didn't always feel that real and this was just one of those books that I really, really wanted to like, so I kept going and telling myself I was enjoying it, but looking back at it, I don't really think I was, because I kept putting it down and not really wanting to pick it back up.

So, not really my thing, sadly. I had such high hopes, so I'm not going to lie, I'm a little disappointed.

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