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calicos's review against another edition
4.0
Moderate: Grief
Minor: Animal death, Death, and Fire/Fire injury
issymaae's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
Graphic: Confinement, Death, and Police brutality
Moderate: Sexual assault, Grief, and Death of parent
Minor: Animal death, Infidelity, and Rape
apthompson's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
4.0
“His soul is too dense. If he comes out, he’ll dissolve into pieces, like a deep-sea fish pulled to the surface too quickly. I suppose my job is to go on holding him here at the bottom of the sea.”
“People—and I’m no exception—seem capable of forgetting almost anything, much as if our island were unable to float in anything but an expanse of totally empty sea.”
This novel, in its Orwellian decent, presents a surveillance-state dystopian island, where collective loss is enforced, and those who remember are systematically destroyed by The Memory Police. This a highly personal and profound type of apocalypse. The plot is reminiscent of The Diary of Anne Frank, and other real life histories of safe houses in the face or persecution; it concerns a woman’s efforts to hide one of the people who remembers, someone she cares for, in a purpose-built annex under her floorboards.
While it is, in many ways, set up like a typical dystopian novel that deftly illustrates the insidious, dehumanizing claw of totalitarianism, the true power of this novel is how it moves past the political implications of a dystopia to the very real horrors of forgetting and the destruction to society and the self this causes. There’s a quiet tension that stalks the pages of the novel. The fear, claustrophobia and struggle feel real.
If you want to read a sci-fi book that explores the effects on the individual, then definitely pick this up.
rating: ★★★★
🗺️ Reading Around the World 2024: Japan 🇯🇵
Graphic: Confinement, Violence, and Police brutality
Moderate: Animal death, Body horror, Death, Blood, and Abandonment
Minor: Emotional abuse, Sexual assault, Sexual content, and Grief
avasbookmark's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Graphic: Confinement
Moderate: Death, Grief, and Fire/Fire injury
Minor: Rape
steph_phanie's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
4.5
Graphic: Grief
Moderate: Death of parent
carolined314's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.75
Graphic: Confinement and Grief
miaaa_lenaaa's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
‘No matter how careful we are, we all leave behind little bits of ourselves as we go about our lives.’
‘Nothing remained on the hillside except things that were quietly awaiting their ruin.’
‘"But how can you hold something that has disappeared?"’
Graphic: Death, Blood, Police brutality, and Grief
steveatwaywords's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
First, do not enter this work thinking you know how books and stories work. Ogawa is going to teach us something new. The narrative success of it may be in question, but there is little doubt that the initial discomfiture and confusion readers experience (both in setting and in narrative pace) are a critical part of what she is up to. For these reasons, if we enter the work seeking a clean and simple "answer" to the mystery of social memory loss, like it's a thriller or detective novel, we will equally be disappointed. Let the novel work on its own terms.
When we do, we find a psychological and emotional dysphoria, an internal world broadcast outward into an external dystopia. Or is it the other way around? In any event, our narrator is herself a writer of novels about writing, memory, and language, themselves highly allegorical. So there is a meta-level to this novel, as well. Which is most significant as a tale to follow?
Along the way, we have plenty of near-nameless characters who test the premise: how should we respond to a world where, each-by-each, its objects are dismantled from both reality and memory? What is the purpose for knowing an objective truth which nevertheless is not shared by a community? How much forced deprivation can or should a people accept before responding? What degree of impoverishment can be normalized?
I've seen other reviews which place specific allegorical meanings to this novel (mental health metaphors, totalitarian economic policies, marriage, etc.), and I won't say they are wrong. But Ogawa's surreal narratives (or magically realistic ones) don't just echo Orwell or Murakami or even Dazai. But she here has tendrils of memory in all these writers while still taking us, inevitably, somewhere else altogether.
Moderate: Mental illness, Dementia, Grief, Dysphoria, and Injury/Injury detail
Depending upon how you read the novel, it is easy to see it as a parallel to mental illness, emotional abuse or destitution, etc.amsswim's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
Moderate: Body horror, Confinement, Death, Panic attacks/disorders, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Terminal illness, Police brutality, Dementia, Grief, Death of parent, and Abandonment
Everything is very vagueprickly_plant's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.75
The writing style and the characters kept me reading (as well as the main character’s novel).
Graphic: Confinement and Toxic relationship
Moderate: Death, Police brutality, and Grief
Minor: Animal death