Book 164 of 2024: The Memory Police by Yoko Ozawa 

 

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️/⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 

 

On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. 

 

Buddy read with @paging_dr.bookworm! We had a lot of great discussions as we read this and I’m glad we read it together. This book had such an interesting premise, and unfortunately it fell a little flat of my expectations. The writing itself was beautiful and the author did an excellent job at creating a surreal, dystopian atmosphere. The characters were strongly developed and I enjoyed getting to know them. The story definitely had 1984/We vibes. I think from reading those books, I had a bit more expectation that a book about the terrible power of a totalitarian regime would at some point reveal said regime and its motivations. But unfortunately the reader is left to guess who controls the Memory Police, why things are erased and reasoning behind selection items for erasure, and who makes the decision to erase things. This really frustrated me as I wanted the narrator to make some grand discovery about the world she was living in, but instead everything kind of just faded off. I also think an epilogue would have helped wrap things up a bit better and could have provided more context to the ending.