In the opening chapters, the narrator’s mother shows her a variety of forgotten objects-some ribbon, a bottle of perfume, an emerald-and she can hardly comprehend them. I wanted more information about the mechanics of this world and to understand how the Memory Police were created, etc., but I stopped looking for answers as the story became more and more abstract. The first half of the book feels like a strange mash-up of 1984 and The Giver set in 1942 Germany.
The unnamed narrator lives on an island where things are forgotten one at a time. Like the winning book, The Discomfort of Evening, it centers around grief and loss, but in a much less tangible way. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa is another book that I’m surprised didn’t win the 2020 International Booker Prize.
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