| Title | : | Memory Wall |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1439182809 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781439182802 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 243 |
| Publication | : | First published July 13, 2010 |
| Awards | : | The Story Prize (2010), 本屋大賞 Translated Fiction (2012) |
In the luminous and beautiful title 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. In 'The River Nemunas', a teenaged orphan moves from Kansas to Lithuania to live with her grandfather, and discovers a world in which myth becomes real. 'Village 113' is about the building of the Three Gorges Dam and the seedkeeper who guards the history of a village soon to be submerged. And in 'Afterworld,' the radiant, cathartic final story, a woman who escaped the Holocaust is haunted by visions of her childhood friends in Germany, yet finds solace in the tender ministrations of her grandson.
The stories in Memory Wall show us how we figure the world, and show Anthony Doerr to be one of the masters of the form.
Memory Wall Reviews
-
“Every hour, 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.”
No surprise that the stories in Memory Wall all focus on memory, attempts to retrieve it and loss. The three most successful stories (Memory Wall, Village 113 and Afterworld) all feature old women on the verge of losing their memory. Memory Wall itself flutters playfully towards sci-fi. Alma, to combat encroaching dementia, has had many of her memories downloaded onto cartridges ( yeah, you have to huff and puff a bit here to suspend disbelief ) that line the wall of a spare room in her house. One of these cartridges contains the memory of the day her husband Harold, a fossil fanatic, discovered an intact dinosaur skeleton out in the desert before succumbing to a heart attack. Two street urchins, one of whom is a “memory-tapper” (he’s had the same operation as Alma) enter her house every night searching for this cartridge. It’s a wacky brilliant story teeming with Doerr’s fabulous stylised lyrical prose and his offsetting of intimate human moments with the eternal impersonal rhythms of the natural world.
The real stunner though is the last story, Afterworld. This reads like an inspired trial run for All the Light We Cannot See. Afterworld tells the story of Esther, a German Jewess who suffers from epilepsy and grows up in a Hamburg orphanage during the years of Nazism. She is the only girl in the orphanage to escape deportation and grows up to become a celebrated illustrator of children’s books. The writing throughout is utterly gorgeous.
Like many books of short stories Memory Wall contains the brilliant, the good and average. Village 113 was good. The River Nemunas read like Doerr had just read all of Nichole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer’s books and had a bash at writing fan fiction. Procreate Generate was okay and I can’t now remember a thing about The Demilitarised Zone. Worth buying though for Memory Wall itself and Afterworld. -
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-monkeys magic, or blood-sucking immortality magic, or any kind of unbelievably supernatural or material witchcraft. No, the magic in these stories is accessible; it feels possible, somehow. It's the kind of magic we all already sort of believe in. Or want to.
And Doerr uses it to elevate the questions he's grappling with here: what we make of memory, and what it makes of us, the nature of love and longing, of connection, between human beings. This is an amazing, beautiful book. -
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 collection of stories, each a strange world unto itself. "Now my husband," Alma says suddenly, not quite speaking to Pheko but to the kitchen at large, 'his passion was always rocks. Rocks and the dead things in them.'" Without saying she has Alzheimer's we suffer the same conflation of sense perceptions; we climb into a deteriorating brain that has moments of clarity but can't stay organized. "'To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.' She looks at Pheko then, though not quite directly at him. As if a guest floats behind him and to his left. Fog seeps through the garden. The trees disappear. The lounge chairs disappear. "'Don't you think?'" Doerr takes a character like this, then, and subjects her to multiple house-break-ins, as thugs search her home each night for one of her late husband's important finds. She knows something is wrong but can't quite place it or remember each night and its violence-seething thievery, and this set up gives us a strange mix of poignancy and tension. You don't know where Doerr will take you, but you want to go, and you strongly suspect that it's the characters themselves, not Doerr, doing all the driving.
-
I read this for a face to face book group that took place last night at my local independent bookshop Five Leaves. It is not a book I would have been likely to choose for myself but it certainly made for a lively and interesting discussion. I have never read Doerr before.
This book is a collection of a novella and five stories, set in several continents at various times in recent history, linked by a theme of memory, how it works, how it shapes lives and what happens when it is lost. The prose often seems plain and direct, but has a poetic precision.
The title novella which opens the collection is set in South Africa. Alma, A widow lives alone in a gated house with her loyal "house boy" Pheko. She is suffering from Alzheimer's, and is participating in a form of therapy (here we enter the realm of sci-fi) in which her memories are captured on cartridges, which she arranges on a wall. Her late husband was a fossil enthusiast, whose death from a heart attack was due to a spectacular find on the "Karoo". An unscrupulous collector breaks into the house with a young street boy looking to harvest the memories to discover the location of the lost fossil.
The other stories that impressed me most were The River Nemunas, in which a 15 year old orphan girl from the mid West goes to live with her grandfather in Lithuania, and Afterworld, in which a dying holocaust escapee and epileptic remembers her war experiences in a Hamburg orphanage while being cared for by her American grandson.
Doerr is strong on characterisation and descriptions of places. My main reservations were that some of his plot contrivances were either a little too visible or just defied belief. Overall I found it an enjoyable read. -
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 summarize the stories themselves which I really don't want to do. That's better left to a reader or to reading the summary on a book jacket. -
BABT
Listen here
Just 'Afterworld' from this collection.
Description: Esther, who is an epileptic, escaped Nazi Germany when she was a child and has lived contentedly in Ohio with her husband and their son. Now 85, her fits have intensified and she is haunted by visions of her childhood friends from the orphanage she grew up in. They appear to be calling to her, as memories from her past flood in. Anthony Doerr is an American author of novels and short stories. He gained widespread recognition for his 2014 novel All The Light We Cannot See which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Afterworld is taken from Memory Wall, a collection of stories about memory.
Episode 1: Esther's seizures open up a new world where old friends await.Episode 2: Esther was ten when change came with the arrival of an emigration letter.Episode 3: Miriam calls to Esther through a microphone.Episode 4: Esther tells her grandson Robert about the girls from the orphanage.Episode 5: Miriam's voice is getting stronger. -
I am a huge fan of The Shell Collector, so was a bit worried when I started reading this collection. The first story takes a rather dystopian view, writing I don't usually warm up to. However, I soon realized that Doerr has chosen to go in a different direction than those stories of his past. He challenged himself, and more than rose to the occasion. I have never read writing quite like this, especially in two of the stories, Memory Wall and Afterworld. And when I was taken abruptly out of these lyrical worlds into the more realistic one in The River Nemunas, I almost balked. However, this story drew me in as well, and ended up portraying one of the most touching relationships in the book, between an orphan and a woman in the last stages of senility and life. What a gift, to be able to imagine so many different worlds, in different styles and language. Simply, a brilliant mind exploring every reach of the human mind with scientific wonder and tenderness.
A must read for fans of literary fiction. -
4,5
Veinte mil días y noches en un lugar, cada cual acodada, atrapada y plegada encima de la anterior, las líneas de sus manos, los dolores entre las vértebras. Embrión, tegumento, endosperma: ¿qué es una semilla sino la forma más pura de recuerdo, un vínculo con todas las generaciones que la han precedido?
El muro de la memoria 3/5
Procrear, Generar 5/5 ;D
La zona desmilitarizada 5/5
El pueblo 1113 5/5
El río Niemen 5/5 ;D
El más alla 5/5 ;D
Las profundidades 4/5 -
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. -
Podcasts have really been influencing my reading lately. This is the second book I went looking for after the "Forbidden Crushes" episode of
Dear Sugar Radio (the first was
Wedlocked: A Memoir by Jay Ponteri.) This collection of stories had nothing to do with the topic of forbidden crushes, but was mentioned in passing. Most people know Doerr from his Pulitzer Prize winning novel,
All the Light We Cannot See, but he had published a few books prior to that success. I was unfamiliar with his previous works and decided to read these stories.
Memory Wall
The title story, this is more of a novella, about a woman who has been undergoing treatment for memory loss. She is an elderly white South African who grew up during apartheid. A thief has employed an orphan to steal her memories to try to find the fossil her husband discovered the day he died of a heart attack. Set in the near future and moving rapidly between points of view and memories, the story is sad in many ways.
Procreate, Generate
A detailed look at a couple as they try everything to conceive, where suddenly bodies become more like machines.
The Demilitarized Zone
Told partially through letters from Korea to a parent, this one was less successful to me.
Village 113
My absolutely favorite story, about a seed keeper living in a Chinese village that is about to be submerged because of a dam. The writing is beautiful, the characters are unique, and I will remember this one.
The River Nemunas
After both her parents die of cancer in the span of a few months, a young girl moves to Lithuania to live with her grandfather. Memory, grief,life.
Afterworld
Esther is close to the end of her life, and seizures transport her to a parallel world where the children she lived with in an orphanage are waiting for her. As a child, the seizures helped her understand she needed to wait until everyone she knew was dead.... this one was a wee bit confusing but I can see his spark of interest in World War II that was more fully developed in All the Light We Cannot See. -
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, from the lengthy opening story about a town in South Africa where doctors have developed a procedure to harvest memories from those suffering from dementia in the hopes of rebuilding some of the brain's connections, to the concluding story about a dying woman struggling with early memories of growing up in Nazi Germany. And each has its own power—some hit you between the eyes while some slowly build in your mind.
This is a tremendously well-written book that really has me thinking about my own memories. Doerr has done a fantastic job, and I can honestly say this is one of the best books I've read all year. -
Dorova rečenica je prelepa: elegantna, nežna, uzvišena. Čovek barata jezikom kao retko ko, sve je tačno gde treba da bude, svaka reč pleše na neki način i čini da tekst odiše nekom lepotom koja se ne sreće često.
Ovo je Dorova druga zbirka priča i bavi se širokim spektrom tema kroz pojam uspomena. Nijedna priča nije sasvim ista, iako ih spaja taj motiv onoga što je bilo, onoga što nas odredjuje i čini ljudima. Istakao bih Dorovo divljenje prirodi kao ključno u skoro svakom njegovom delu (pa čak i u Svetlima). Čovek ume da vidi ono što svi vidimo, a ne primećujemo. Veličanstvenost svakodnevnice, veličanstvenost jedne pahulje izgubljene u snegu. Dor piše pesme u prozi.
Nijedna priča nije loša, nijedna nije tzv. filler i ocenio bih ih ovako:
Memory Wall - na devedeset stranica postiže ono što romani često ne uspevaju, prosto nas tera da se povežemo sa likovima i sa njihovim emocijama, da proživimo neki drugi život kroz tudje uspomene. Saj-faj temelji takodje čine ovu priču posebnom. 5+
Procreate, Generate - iako prati pomalo već ustaljene obrasce priče i obradjuje već dosta obradjenu tematiku potomstva, Dorov stil je čini upečatljivom. 4
The Demilitarized Zone - kratko, duboko, prelepo. Jedino mi je žao što zbog dužine priče nisam mogao da se bolje upoznam sa likovima ala Memory Wall. 5-
Village 113 - oda prirodi i upozorenje na promenu. Ne mogu više da ovo istaknem, ali Dor stvarno savršeno piše, medjutim ova priča me iz nekog razloga nije toliko dotakla, uprkos prefinjenosti proze. Možda mi jednostavno nije bio dan kada sam je čitao. 4-
The River Nemunas - postavlja neverovatno jednostavno, a suštinsko pitanje: šta je vera ako ne uspomena? Još jednom snažni likovi i još snažnija alegorija, čista petica. 5
The Afterworld - o ovoj neću ništa posebno da kažem, kako ne bih pokvario bilo šta, osim da je ova priča vrhunac i više nego promišljen kraj zbirke. Stoji rame uz rame sa Memory Wall-om. 5+
I kad se sve to sračuna i podeli, to mu dodje petica za celu zbirku. Ali i da su 4 od 6 priča bile loše, a ove druge dve bile The Afterworld i Memory Wall, Dorova zbirka bi zaslužila svaku preporuku.
5 -
This is a beautiful collection of stories that explore memory, its power, its pain, and how it affects who we are and how we live. I found every story meaningful. I choked up repeatedly--I was not prepared for how sad and poignant the stories are.
The title story is a futuristic tale of a time when memories can be extracted from the mind and kept in cartridges. The story is set in South Africa and deals with apartheid as well as the memory loss of the elderly woman, Alma, the subject of the story.
In The River Nemunas, a 15 year old orphan moves from Kansas to Lithuania to live with her grandfather following the death of her parents. She struggles with her grief and her difficulty summoning memories of her parents. She befriends (or is befriended by) an elderly woman with dementia. I loved Alison; Doerr evokes her loneliness and pain so well I felt I was with her in her sadness.
Every story in this book is a gem. It's the kind of book I want to read again--it I can deal with the emotions it triggers. -
My only complaint with this book is that it came to an end.
-
Schon im Febraur beendet.
Ein packendes Buch und ganz anders, als der Klappentext einen glauben machen will. Abzug nur für den etwas ruckeligen Schreibstil. Ich bin noch immer nicht sicher, ob es in unserer Zeit, in der Zukunft oder einer Parallelwelt spielt.
Lieblingszitat: "Nichts bleibt", sagte Harold. "Das etwas versteinert, ist ein Wunder. Die Chancen stehen eins zu fünfzig Millionen. Der Rest von uns? Wir verschwinden im Gras, in Käfern, in Würmern, in Lichtstfeifen." -
Every now and then I find a piece of literature that proves that a certain alignment of letters on a page can totally surpass being classified as 'language' and express the deepest echoes of the human heart. This miracle of storytelling happened for me a couple of times in this book. Where you simply have to stop, close your eyes, and literally feel the pull of the words as they pluck your individual heart strings. This is a collection of short stories. Varying tales of love and loss, and the fragility of the memories we retain, and rebuild, of both. With the first and last stories most definitely worthy of 6 stars the whole book easily earns 5 of them from me. The first story Memory Wall, presents an extremely original concept, where memories are retained on 'cartridges' so they can be veiwed later. Doerr took my breath away with these two paragraphs, that prefectly describe the effects of dementia.....
'Each cartridge on Alma's wall becomes a little brazier, burning in the darkness. Luvo wanders between them, gradually exploring the labyrinth of her history. Maybe, he thinks, at the beginning, before the disease had done its worst, the wall offered Alma a measure of control over what was happening to her. Maybe she could hang a cartridge on a nail and find it a day or two later and feel her brain successfully recall the same memory again - a new pathway forged through the dustlight.
When it worked, it must have been like descending into a pitch-black cellar fora jar of preserves, and finding the jar waiting there - cool and heavy, so she bring it up the bowed and dusty stairs into the light of hte kitchen. For a while it must have worked for Alma, anyway; it must have helped her believe she could fend off her inevitable erasure.'
Seriously, ... her inevitable erasure... can words more exquisitely paint the slow erosion of memory?
And in the final story, a grandson remembers his beloved Grandmother, and beautifully ponders the dual directionality of life .... 'We return to the places we're from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines. "You've grown up so fast," Robert's mother tells him at breakfast, "look at you". But she's wrong, thinks Robert. You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come abck and dig it up.'
Doerr is a writing I will be keeping on the top of my list, and I can't wait to get my hands on his other books. He most certainly has the skill to turn a great craft into a work of art. -
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 for the five stories that accompany it. But rest assured, this is not magical realism. No shape shifting or prestidigitation takes place in these intensely observed narratives, which capture what poet Elizabeth Bishop has called "a mind thinking." That mind could belong to a 15-year-old girl from Kansas getting off a plane in Lithuania with a poodle (memorably) named Mishap, a nonagenarian Holocaust survivor with a seizure disorder, or a fertility-challenged couple in Idaho who must document their every move and who may or may not have finally achieved their objective. Acclaimed author Doerr (The Shell Collector) is equally at home in long and short form, as his numerous O. Henry Awards and presence in anthologies attest. VERDICT This book is a gift to the memory-impaired reader in all of us. Reading it will recharge your neurons and stimulate a few memories of its own.—Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA -
"Memory Wall" - the first story really knocked my socks off. This is set in South Africa during a time when doctors can implant a device in your head to help combat dementia. There is a lot to this story, but I don't want to give it all away.
"Procreate, Generate" - a couple struggles with the stress of infertility.
"The Demilitarized Zone" - a divorced couple corresponds with their son who is away at war.
"Village 113" - an entire village is about to be flooded out for the advancement of civilization. The engineer making it happen returns home and attempts to talk his mother out of leaving.
"The River Nemunas" - Allison is fifteen when both her parents die. She is sent to Lithuania to live with her maternal grandfather. This is her story of grieving.
"Afterworld" - this a story about Esther - in her eighties and when she is a girl - and it is so sad and heartbreaking. But, Doerr handles the subject matter with grace.
Wow. I am so glad I found my way to Doerr. I think he may be my favorite writer. He has such a gift with words. When I am reading his books, I feel completely transported to whatever world he is creating.
Phenomenal. -
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, made me think back to "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down," and how disabilities might be conceived as gifts. I've been thinking about the themes and characters in this book for weeks now and simply cannot write a review that does it justice. If you're like me, this book will cause you to reflect on what memories mean, what gives our lives meaning, and how a great story can leave an imprint on your heart. Cheesy, I know, but I'm serious. -
De este autor leí “la luz que no puedes ver” un libro precioso pero, a la vez muy triste. Quería probar con este porque es de relatos. Un libro con siete relatos de muy distintos rasgos, incluso algunos de distinto género, pero con un nexo común, la memoria. La memoria es lo que nos humaniza o deshumaniza, según sea el caso si la tenemos o la hemos perdido. Reconozco que escribe muy bien pero, para mi, son historias demasiado tristes. Yo lo he ido mezclando con otros libros, quizás sea lo ideal para no leer tanta pena junta. Si os gusta su forma de escribir seguramente estos relatos también os deleitarán.
-
Pues no lo abandone al principio por el morbo del relato del holocausto, la verdad.
No me ha gustado nada, ni los relatos ni tan siquiera la escritura, no le veo el punto al autor para tanta fama que tiene! -
Popsugar 2021: Categoría 11. Un libro sobre el olvido
He leido este libro en una lectura conjunta, lo más probable es que yo nunca hubiese leido este libro si no fuese por eso, ya que no es un libro que me llamase la atención.
Este es un libro de relatos, los cuales tratan sobre el olvido, la memoria y los recuerdos de diversas formas, me han parecido relatos llenos de tristeza y melancolía, la narrativa del autor es bastante buena y hace que se lean fácil, pero algunos relatos se me han hecho algo lentos y aburridos.
Entre los relatos que menos me han gustado están, Procrear, generar y el que da el título al libro El muro de la memoria, este último tiene parte de ciencia ficción en su trama y me ha parecido bastante raro.
Y entre los que más me han gustado están La zona desmilitarizada, Río Niemen y El más allá, este último es el que más me ha gustado de todos, seguramente sea porque la temática del relato, me interesa bastante y suelo leer novelas sobre ese tema. -
Hace tiempo que compré este libro tras leer y disfrutar "La luz que no puedes ver", pero hasta ahora no había encontrado la ocasión. Esta vez coincidió que fue el libro elegido para una lectura conjunta en temática ciencia ficción.
Lo primero, no es ciencia-ficción, aunque parte de la historia del primer relato lo sea. Es más bien narrativa, en forma de relatos cortos, independientes, pero todos con un hilo conductor: la memoria o la falta de ella, las ganas de vivir, el dolor de la pérdida.
Son relatos que te hacen reflexionar, con toque de drama (ni uno se salva de ese halo de tristeza). Un buen libro que sin embargo me ha resultado en momentos aburrido, un tanto surrealista en algún relato. -
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 seems to be revealing more about the lives of these people (which is done well) but I keep finding myself asking, "Whats the point?" I get the theme of memories, but I don't feel he's saying anything new that I didn't know before opening the book. I feel he's taken an in depth look at these character's lives, but not into memories. That being the case, I would rather have some conclusion of their lives and struggles we experience with them than leaving all the strings untied at the end.
-
If you'd like your heart to be broken, not once but six times, read this collection of short stories from Anthony Doerr. They are poignant, beautiful, haunting and some of the best writing I've ever come across. Each deals with memory--what makes memories, what happens when we lose memories, what happens as we create them, do we pass them on to others, etc.
Which I find to be a very tender topic in this day and age when so many of our seniors are dealing with memory issues.
Do I highly recommend it?
Well, yeah. If you want your heart broken.
Or if you'd like to simply be immersed in a very good short story. -
Mooie verhalen over de kracht van herinneringen.
Hebben een serieuze impressie achtergelaten op mijn gemoed. -
"What is memory anyway? How can it be such a frail, perishable thing?”
These are the central questions in this novella plus additional short stories. Without trying to provide easy answers or falling back on clichés, Doerr takes the reader deep into the fractured minds of his characters.
I was immediately drawn into the title novella’s premise, set in Cape Town. Alzheimer afflicted Alma has had a medical procedure to allow her memories to be “reaped” and replayed electronically. We get to know her in the present day, plus relive her flashbacks as her servant plays memories back to her. I love the idea that, “What we know is always evolving, always subdividing. Remember anything often enough and you can create a new memory, the memory of remembering." What I love even more is that Doerr didn’t just write this as a sci-fi concept. He fills this story with heart-wrenching characters – all in search of history, memory, evidence of life.
Likewise, in the sweet and affecting “The River Nemunas,”we meet a young orphan dropped into rural Lithuania after the death of her parents. She and her cat (aptly named Mishap) try to find a place, a rhythm to this new life. Mostly though, Allison struggles against the weight of memory.
"Thinking about the house sitting there empty back in Kansas starts the Big Sadness swinging in my chest like a pendulum and soon a blue flood is streaming around the edges of my vision. It comes on fast this time and the axe blade is slicing up organs willy-nilly and all of the sudden I'm looking into a very blue bag and someone's yanking the drawstring closed.”
Doerr’s writing is both beautiful and haunting. I was impressed by his character development, especially in such short stories. Whether he’s writing an aging Holocaust victim’s childhood in Poland or a Wyoming couple’s struggles with infertility, he finds each person’s true voice. I was swept away time and time again.
“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.” -
Memory Wall - Doerr
audio performance by multiple narrators
5 stars
Anthony Doerr published four books before the phenomenally successful All the Light We Cannot See; one novel, one memoir, and two collections of short stories. Memory Wall is the collection that was published in 2010.
There are six stories in this book. Not one of the six is even mildly disappointing. The stories differ in characters and setting. Memory Wall, the title story, is a about an elderly, white, dementia patient and takes place in South Africa. It is speculative,science fiction that proposes a chilling ‘what if’ scenario in memory reclamation. Procreate, Generate and The Demilitarized Zone are contemporary fiction set in middle America. Village 113 chronicles China’s Three Gorges Dam construction through the eyes of a village ‘seed keeper’. The River Nemunas sends an orphaned American teenager to live with her Lithuanian grandfather. In the last story, Afterworld, an elderly Holocaust survivor spends her last days with her grandson while having seizure induced visitations with her lost childhood friends.
Each of these stories explores an aspect of memory, but they are not linked to each other in any other way. Each setting is distinct, with great attention paid to the flora and fauna of the natural world. Doerr’s prose is lyrical and haunting. The characters are real enough to walk off the pages.
The audio production used different performers for each story. Lisette Lecat was perfect for the South African Story. All of the stories were well read. Although, despite the Chinese surname, Louis Changchien read as if Three Gorges Dam was located in the middle of Kansas. -
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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From BBC Radio 4 - Book at Bedtime:
Written by Anthony Doerr. Esther, who is an epileptic, escaped Nazi Germany when she was a child and has lived contentedly in Ohio with her husband and their son. Now 85, her fits have intensified and she is haunted by visions of her childhood friends from the orphanage she grew up in. They appear to be calling to her, as memories from her past flood in.
Episode 1:
Esther's seizures open up a new world where old friends await.
Anthony Doerr is an American author of novels and short stories. He gained widespread recognition for his 2014 novel All The Light We Cannot See which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Afterworld is taken from Memory Wall, a collection of stories about memory.
Writer: Anthony Doerr
Abridger: Jeremy Osborne
Reader: Allan Corduner
Producer: Karen Rose
A Sweet Talk production for BBC Radio 4.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b092f4jc
