Of unease, bizarre feeling of distance from reality, and questions in limbo — or how "The Memory Police" made me feel
I was swayed a bit for a moment as I scrolled the heaps of mixed reviews on "The Memory Police"—some good, some bad, some eh. But I prevailed lol.
This is the best book I've read this year so far.
[There will be spoilers below!]
Set in a small, dystopian island under the totalitarian memory police, a novelist, her editor, and a former ferryman deal with the epidemic of forgetting and loss as their sense of the world gets thinner, brought by the sporadic disappearances. These disappearances come with a freebie: a person's five senses and emotional attachments about what was lost gradually disappear too.
When the unnamed book author woke up one day and the novels had disappeared, her recollection about them were also gone that she couldn't bring herself to hold a pen and write as much as she used to.
And in this island, those who remember are hunted down by the memory police.
I finished the book with whys and hows still hanging in the air, but it was such a can't-slam-the-brake-pedal ride. I got more engrossed in the story as more items and what were considered fundamental human needs cease to exist, and the titular authorities become tyrannical.
As the disappearances sped up, I felt a cloud of unease and obscurity thickening and miscellany holes burgeoning in my soul—which was why I couldn't stop until I get the answers.
It was easy to distinguish Yoko Ogawa's novel as an allegory of how people deal with loss and make the most of what remained. "The Memory Police" was delivered gently and uncomplicated, but with the apparent eerie calm that both intrigued and creeped me out.
It may have ended with a cliffhanger, but it suited the book's enigmatic nature best—or in simpler terms, some things are probably better left as they are, whether the novelist was left to rot in the basement and the people who remember left the dying island for good.
