Customer Reviews

Memory Wall: Stories

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Aldous Huxley once famously said, "Every man's memory is his private literature." In this luminous collection of short stories (including an 83 page novella), Anthony Doerr probes the fragility and endurance of memory, in locales that vary from South Africa to Hamburg...from Lithuania to Wyoming...and from the heinousness of the Holocaust to an immediate dystopian future.

This masterful collection is bookmarked by an opening and an ending story with two diverse elderly women as key protagonists. The title story, Memory Wall, presents the elderly Alma, who lives in South Africa where she undergoes periodic "harvesting" of memories, stored on a series of numbered cartridges. By "hooking herself up", she is able to recreate experiences to stave off her worsening dementia. She falls victim to a criminal and his accomplice "memory hunter" who attempt to rummage through these cartridges to find the location of a rare and lucrative gorgon fossil - one that will be the ticket to the good life that has been denied them. The young accomplice muses, "Dr. Amnesty's cartridges, the South African Museum, Harold's fossils, Chefe Carpenter's collection, Alma's memory wall - weren't they all ways of trying to defy erasure? What is memory anyway? How can it be such a frail, perishable thing?"

The ending story also focuses on an elderly woman - in this case, Esther, an orphan and an epileptic, who was spared the fate of her many close friends in Birkenau. Now in her early 80s and living in suburban Cleveland, her seizures are getting worse and she returns again and again in her mind to poignant, nightmarish memories of her times in ravaged Hamburg, as she relives her survivors guilt. As he watches her deterioration, her grandson Robert reflects, "Every hour...all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during the same hour, children are moving about, surveying territory that to them is totally new."

As in most short story collections, each reader will likely have his or her favorites. One of mine is the fable-like Village 113; the Three Gorges Dam is about to be built, submerging a village and forcing its inhabitants to relocate. The tale is relayed by seed keeper, whose engineer son is spearheading the project. Doerr writes, "Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it is a village slated to be inundated." The seed keeper and the schoolteacher are quite literally drowning in memories.

Each of Anthony Doerr's well-crafted stories focuses on the most important things in life: birth, death, survival, solace, but most of all the memories that - according to the epigraph from Luis Buñuel - are "our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action."

The wise, deep stories of Anthony Doerr are a literary treasure. They are written with tenderness, perception of character and compassionate insight into the human heart. The collection centers around memory and their settings vary widely: an old woman remembering her long murdered girlfriends in a Nazi Germany orphanage; a woman seed keeper in a remote Chinese village which will soon be submerged by a dam, drowning her heritage and her own past; an American couple in such a desperate search to conceive a child that their lives are condensed to a singular purpose.

Though old people die and are "glowing atlases dragged into graves," new generations of children are born and accumulate memories. "They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade."

How real the characters are! How deep their dreams; their past is as vividly alive to them as their present, in many cases more so. We are, the writer says, our memories. He writes with reverence and poetry of the incredible kindness between people in the worst of times and a singing belief in the human spirit.

For many, including this reader, Anthony Doerr is not a household name, though his resume is quite impressive. Doerr is an accomplished writer, having received multiple O. Henry Prizes, awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship. He is currently the Writer-in-Residence for the State of Idaho. MEMORY WALL,a thematically linked collection of short stories, is Doerr's second such effort, having also written two novels. The offerings here share memory, the source of meaning and coherence in our lives as a common theme. The result is a powerful and thought-provoking series of stories.

The novella-length "Memory Wall" is set in modern South Africa. Alma Konachel is a 74-year-old South African widow suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Surgery allows her to recall her life's experience by implanting encapsulated memories into her brain. When not in use, those memory capsules are stored in her private memory wall, and one of them contains a memory noteworthy for its value. Two young, unscrupulous men break into Alma's home seeking to discover and seize this unique treasure. The beauty of the story is what it asks and tells the reader about memories. Even our private memories do not really belong to us. In many ways, the only value of a memory comes from sharing it with others. "Memory Wall" is also a mysterious and thrilling story that has already been optioned to Hollywood; its unique plot has the potential for a thrilling movie.

"The River Nemunas" is haunting because it is so untraditional. Fifteen-year-old Allison has lost her mother and father to the ravages of cancer. Her only living relative is Grandpa Z., who lives in Lithuania. Allison's story is told in her voice as she travels from Kansas to Europe to live with her grandfather. This unique moment in her life is captured by her comments to Grandpa Z. as they eat their first dinner together. "It's okay," I say, "I've been saying it's okay a lot lately. I've said it to church ladies and flight attendants and counselors. I don't know if I'm fine or if it's okay, or if saying it makes anyone feel better. Maybe it's just something to say." As Allison settles into her new Lithuanian life, she experiences some of the same events that her mother recounted to her about her childhood. Experiencing these memories after her mother's death creates an upside down view of life, making "The River Nemunas" provocative as well as entertaining. They also allow Doerr to devote part of the story to one of his favorite motifs: fishing.

"Afterworld" takes readers to a German orphanage where a dozen Jewish girls live as Adolph Hitler rises to power. Esther Gramm is one of the 12 who somehow manages to avoid the death camps of the Holocaust. This story reminds us of the never-ending life cycle, where each day memories are dragged to the grave while others frolic and new ones are created. Each day, the world is remade.

MEMORY WALL is a beautiful book that my miserly words cannot truly capture and describe. In an era of glitzy and gaudy stories, this is a collection that will rekindle a fire in readers, that there are still top-notch writers whose stories are to be savored. Those who still appreciate great literature will enjoy Doerr's latest effort.

There are six stories in here, not all short. One fell completely flat for me--a young couple slogs through the quicksand of infertility in typical litmag fashion--but the rest are amazing enough to not cost any stars! The title piece and last one, Afterworld, really make you blink after and think, "What just happened?" The theme of memory is woven through each, he sprinkles science throughout (a couple are even sf) and the diversity of characters and settings(!) is terrific. An elderly white woman in South Africa has her memories stored on cartridges that a young black man steals. A teenage American girl goes to live with her grandfather in Lithuania after her parents are killed. An old woman in China contemplates what to do in light of the dam being built that will inundate her village. A young Jewish girl in Germany faces the Holocaust--in a remarkably fresh and chilling take on a well-known history. Just wonderful.

In the title story, the central conceit of retrievable, replayable experiences strikes that perfect, engrossing balance between sci-fi and just-in-the-future. You want to believe it's true because it's so fascinating. And really, dyeing a brain to preserve memories isn't that far removed from taking photos or videos, is it? And more generally, as with all the best fiction, this story blends the novel, the unusual, and the individual with the universal. I will never be a 74-year old South African widow, but I will face the same slow decline into dementia, feel the same helplessness at the disintegration of self, and so Alma Konahoek's story is my own by another name.

Of course another salient, wonderful point about Doerr's writing is his descriptions, his ability to make you sense a place--whether physical or emotional--with delicious freshness or bitter familiarity. To open the book, he calls the Vredehoek suburb of Cape Town "a place of warm rains, big-windowed lofts, and silent, predatory automobiles." Or this one: "In the lulls between breaths, she can hear traffic sighing past." So often in moents like these, it's just one or two exquisitely unexpected words, but the effect is to help us see the world through sharper eyes, hear through bigger ears, or feel with more tender hearts.

Of the six stories that comprise the collection, I would put two in the "remember for years" category (the title story, and "Village 113," rank a third, "Procreate, Generate" in the "outstanding" category, and the remaining three as "merely" very good (in part, because the author was, commendably, experimenting with some new techniques. But throughout, Doerr reminds readers of the power of a newly-minted phrase to make us regard life anew, and the marvelous ability of fiction to instruct, enlarge, and enthrall.

Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr


This is a remarkable cluster of short stories spanning continents and generations, all manifesting the author's embrace of humanity and the natural forces we interact with. The young, the old, the sick and those pulsing with life and strength; snows-scapes and burned cities;ever-rushing rivers and fairytale tent-cities - all have their place.

A nameless great river in China and the Nemunas river in Lithuania which harbors an unexpected secret, both serve as metaphors for the never-ending flow of time's river. The horrors of the Holocaust in Hamburg; of Soviet rule in Lithuania; and the oppression in today's China, are all seen afloat in that river.

The river is not only ever-moving and ever-changing with each part of its flow as real as the segment before and after, it is also a great connector. The mountains from whence the rivulets begin their journey, tumbling down to the broad expanse between its banks,all the way to the ocean where it empties, are bound together by its watery movement. So too, are the generations joined through the river of memories we have of those who came before us. And thus will we be remembered and connect with others beyond our time. Our humanness and our memories flow together, and those who would erase them through mass geographical dislocation, as well as mass propaganda strike us in a core place.

The writer's prose-poetry - ".. the moonlight landing on rows of distant corn and the silver lines of riffles where the river wrinkles along its banks" ; "Saplings grow from ruptures in the street. Flights of pink-rimmed clouds sail overhead."; " He's wearing a cashmere vest. She waves a wine glass as she talks. Her pants are shiny and gold; I've never seen them before. On the counter behind them sits a ravaged turkey" - lights up each story and makes reading them a continuous delight.

I'm amazed by Doerrs' ability to write from the vantage point of an adolescent American orphan trying to adjust to life in a suburb of Vilnius; an epileptic Jewish girl living in Hamburg during the Holocaust and at age eighty-one, spending her last days with her college-age grandson at her home by the shores of Lake Eire; and an old Chinese woman seed-collector and vendor stubbornly refusing to heed her son's warnings and staying on in her ancestral village as the time of the state-planned flooding approaches.

There is so much perspective, wisdom, and beauty woven through these stories. It's as if Doerr were both of us and above us, seeing us clearly and compassionately from a Parnassian perch.

As you may gather, I highly recommend this book.



Frank Rubenfeld
August 22, 2010

Anthony Doerr's writing is engaging both structurally and poetically. Memory Wall is filled with memorable images, characters and settings. It's clear Doerr cares for everyone. Even animals.

What are memories when you are the only one that has them? What are you when memory fades? "Memory Wall" is a book of stories, each interesting on its own, that are tied together into a cohesive whole, bound by a familiar and universal theme.

The settings are diffuse: South Africa, China, Lithuania, wartime Germany, wartime Korea, Ohio, Wyoming, and Idaho. The portraits of human effort, cruelty, charity, frailty and longing are written with the care of a poet. Various forms of memory are explored related to:

Seeds, "What is a seed if not the purest form of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it.";
Places, "Every stone, every stair, is a key to memory.";
Possessions, "Everything, all of it, our junk, our dregs, our memories.";
Fossils, "Nothing lasts, for a fossil to happen is a miracle... It's the rarest thing that does not get erased, broken down, transformed.";
Personal history, "Memory builds without any clean or objective logic: a dot here, another dot here, and plenty of dark spaces in between. What we know is always evolving, always subdividing";
Aging, "with the lamp extinguished beside her, streams of unbidden memories rise---decades old, deeply buried.";
Going home, "We return to the places we're from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines... You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up."

These topics and quotes are simple examples of what flows through each unique story. Standing alone they in no way capture the beauty of this book that may be, just maybe, found in the eyes of a reader. "Memory Wall" is pleasantly mesmerizing. Some introspection is required. It comes naturally.

Anthony Doerr continues to prove that there is nothing brief or diminished or less in short fiction. Stories like "Memory Wall", "Village 113", and "Afterworld" are as rich and full as most novels I've read, creating entire worlds of empathy and thought with insight, grace and precision. This is one of the best collections of stories I've ever read, and Doerr is one the best writers working today.

Memory Wall stands as a new marker in the history of the finest literature in English and a link to the traditions that precede Doerr's work. His stories hold the lyrical language of the 19th century, the engrossing story lines and character development of the 20th century, and the compelling human narrative of the ages. Doerr achieves this while embodying the sensibilities and ethos of his own 21st century world. These stories are not precocious representations of these past traditions, but rather fresh and honest interpretations of timeless human experiences. I cared about the individuals in each of these stories in a way that creates the most satisfying reading.