I began reading The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa the week my office, and most of the city, decided to temporarily close. I gladly welcomed the opportunity to embrace a dystopia through a novel, in an attempt to delay my own response to our own pandemic reality.
The premise is simple: an unnamed protagonist lives on an anonymous island where things keep disappearing, sanctioned by the bureaucratic Memory Police. Oh, and she’s also a writer, so woven within the main narrative are selections from her own novel that mirror the plot. Very meta.
Ogawa’s writing is simple and effective, occasionally beautiful, but mostly restrained. This would explain why it took me 7 long weeks, to finish this novel, and let me tell you, it was not worth it. It is not a long book (just shy of 300 pages) but the novelty of the disappearances wears thin about half way through, and by the end I found myself impatient and unsympathetic to characters I hardly got to know, who did and said so little, considering what was at stake.
The opposite is true for Ling Ma’s Severance, another dystopian novel that eerily mirrors our current moment. I began it last night and had to force myself to put it down and finally go to bed after several hours. More on that later!