ladislara's Reviews (110)

If you are like me, fascinated about the history of humankind from the stone age to the smartphone era, this book is for you. 

Yuval Noah Harari not only succeeded in condensing 700,000 years of history in 400 pages, but he managed to do so with such a unique point of view of historical events that it will make you question everything you know. 

The main point of the book, in my opinion, is the idea that humans were only able to create a technologically advanced society because of our collective imagination. He states that entities such as the judicial system, parties, money, nations or companies only exist in our brains, and they can only work because a vast number of people agreed to believe at the same time in the same thing. 

 Even money, something you could argue that has a material existence in the form of bills and coins, is part of our vivid imagination. A $20 bill is only worth $20 because we all agree on it. Otherwise, it’s just a colourful piece of paper (or plastic in some cases). 
 

This is a revolutionary concept, but Harari doesn’t stop there. He presents to the general public new ideas about the rise of empires, the scientific revolution and Capitalism. He demonstrates how these three human constructs are closely intertwined and couldn’t exist without one another. 

European empires were only able to expand throughout the whole world thanks to the curiosity of scientific expeditions and their discoveries. And in turn, new materials and species could only be accessed with the conquest of new worlds. Science itself could just advance with the funding provided by corporations and governments, and its findings are in great deal dictated by the profits they can generate. Capitalism, in turn, was built on top of new scientific discoveries, that allow the industry to explore new materials to create products never before imagined. 

 This is my second book by Yōko Ogawa. The first one I've read, The Housekeeper and the Professor, touched me by it's simplicity and poetry. 

This one is no different. The story is set in a fictional island in which is common for everyday objects to simply disappear. One day is perfume, the other day is hats, the other is all the ferries. Every day when something new disappears the population of the island simply goes to the river to dispose of all the objects or burn them, since they no longer recognize them or have any memory of what they mean.

But there are those who simply can't forget the disappeared things. I in order to make sure no trace of the objects is left, the Memory Police was created and starts watching the citizens' every move. 

The setting is dark and tense, but somehow Ogawa's prose seem to float in the air. There's such a delicacy in the way she describes the main characters and their relation to themselves that you almost don't feel the weight that is hanging over all of them. 

The perfect passivity and submission of the island's inhabitants is so well set into the plot that you can't help but feeling that that's the natural response to such strange phenomena. 

And yet, it's very telling of people's mass behavior. How people, despite all the disturbance that the disappearances cause (one day even calendars and dates disappear), tend to go on living like nothing happened in order to fit in with the crowd. 

But of course, there's also resistance and those who are determined to keep remembering, despite all the risks. 

Overall this was a great read, and I can't wait to read some more of her work.