The Memory Police | Ogawa, Yoko

Lange Beschreibung
Finalist for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award

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

On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. . . . Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few able 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 writer discovers that her editor is in danger, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her f loorboards, and together they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. Powerful and provocative, The Memory Police is a stunning novel about the trauma of loss.

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST * TIME * CHICAGO TRIBUNE * THE GUARDIAN * ESQUIRE * THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS * FINANCIAL TIMES * LIBRARY JOURNAL * THE A.V. CLUB * KIRKUS REVIEWS * LITERARY HUB

American Book Award winner

Rezensierung
Unforgettable. . . . A masterful work of speculative fiction.   Chicago Tribune

Ogawa s fable echoes the themes of George Orwell s 1984, Ray Bradbury s Fahrenheit 451, and Gabriel García Márquez s One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it has a voice and power all its own. Time

A masterpiece. . . . A novel that makes us see differently. . . . It is a rare work of patient and courageous vision. The Guardian

A feat of dark imagination . . . an intimate, suspenseful drama of courage and endurance. The Wall Street Journal

[A] masterly novel. The New Yorker

An elegantly spare dystopian fable. . . . It tingles with dread.   The New York Times Book Review

Quietly devastating . . . Ogawa finds new ways to express old anxieties about authoritarianism, environmental depredation and humanity s willingness to be complicit in its own demise. The Washington Post
 
Timely, provocative reading . . . A harrowing parable about the importance of memory and the profound danger of cultural amnesia.   Esquire
 
One of my favorite novels of the decade. . . . It s a perfect correction to the overwrought politico-apocalyptic fiction so fashionable in These Times. . . . It clarifies all the things our wired society muddles, especially, and most profoundly, the saving grace of the human touch.   Hillary Kelly, Vulture
 
Profoundly powerful. . . . It has the timelessness of a fable, yet feels like an urgent warning about the need for resistance in a world that seems all too quick to forget the lessons of the past.   The A.V. Club
 
A searing, vividly imagined novel by a wildly talented writer . . . Dark and ambitious. Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
The novel is particularly resonant now, at a time of rising authoritarianism across the globe. Throughout the book, citizens live under police surveillance. Novels are burned. People are detained and interrogated without explanation. The New York Times
 
Ogawa lays open a hushed defiance against a totalitarian regime by training her prodigious talent on magnifying the efforts of those who persistently but quietly rebel. The Japan Times
 
Strange, beautiful and affecting.   The Sunday Times (London)
 
The Memory Police truly feels like a portrait of today. To await the future is to disappear the present which only accelerates the speed with which now turns to then, and then turns to nothing . . . A lovely, if bleak, meditation on faith and creativity or faith in creativity in a world that disavows both.   Wired 


Haunting and imaginative. Refinery29
 
Ogawa crafts a powerful story about the processing of loss and the importance of memories. Annabel Gutterman, Time
 
Eerily surreal, Ogawa s novel takes Orwellian tropes of a surveillance state and makes them markedly her own. Thrillist
 
A taut, claustrophobic thriller. Salon

Buchausschnitt

1
I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first ­among all the things that have vanished from the island.
 
Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here, my mother used to tell me when I was still a child. Transparent things, fragrant things . . . fluttery ones, bright ones . . . wonderful things you can t possibly imagine.
 
It s a shame that the people who live here haven t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that s just the way it is on this island. Things go on disappearing, one by one. It won t be long now, she added. You ll see for yourself. Something will disappear from your life.
 
Is it scary? I asked her, suddenly anxious.
 
No, don t worry. It doesn t hurt, and you won t even be particularly sad. One morning you ll simply wake up and it will be over, before you ve even realized. Lying still, eyes closed, ears pricked, trying to sense the flow of the morning air, you ll feel that something has changed from the night before, and you ll know that you ve lost something, that something has been disappeared from the island.
 
My mother would talk like this only when we were in her studio in the basement. It was a large, dusty, rough-­floored room, built so close to the river on the north side that you could clearly hear the sound of the current. I would sit on the little stool that was reserved for my use, as my mother, a sculptor, sharpened a chisel or polished a stone with her file and talked on in her quiet voice.
 
The island is stirred up after a disappearance. People gather in little groups out in the street to talk about their memories of the thing that s been lost. There are regrets and a certain sadness, and we try to comfort one another. If it s a physical object that has been disappeared, we gather the remnants up to burn, or bury, or toss into the river. But no one makes much of a fuss, and it s over in a few days. Soon enough, things are back to normal, as though nothing has happened, and no one can even recall what it was that disappeared.
 
Then she would interrupt her work to lead me back behind the staircase to an old cabinet with rows of small drawers.
 
Go ahead, open any one you like.
 
I would think about my choice for a moment, studying the rusted oval handles.
 
I always hesitated, because I knew what sorts of strange and fascinating things were inside. Here in this secret place, my mother kept hidden many of the things that had been disappeared from the island in the past.
 
When at last I made my choice and opened a drawer, she would smile and place the contents on my outstretched palm.
 
This is a kind of fabric called ribbon that was disappeared when I was just seven years old. You used it to tie up your hair or decorate a skirt.
 
And this was called a bell. Give it a shake ­it makes a lovely sound.
 
Oh, you ve chosen a good drawer today. That s called an emerald, and it s the most precious thing I have here. It s a keepsake from my grandmother. They re beautiful and terribly valuable, and at one point they were the most highly prized jewels on the island. But their beauty has been forgotten now.
 
This one is thin and small, but it s important. When you had something you wanted to tell someone, you would write it down on a piece of paper and paste this stamp on it. Then they would deliver it for you, anywhere at all. But that was a long time ago . . .&