Just So Stories Hardcover Kipling
Article by Jack
Books made of linked stories, like recent award-winning favorites Olive Kitteridge and Let the Great World Spin, are usually connected by shared places and people. The tender and lyrical stories in Anthony Doerr’s Memory Wall are linked no less strongly, but, as if Oliver Sacks had turned to fiction, by a neurological theme. Set as far apart as South Africa and the Korean DMZ, Doerr’s stories circle around the central pull of memory, both the struggle against memory’s loss and the weight of memories that remain. In the long and brilliantly intricate title story, as memories fade from an aging white woman in suburban Cape Town, they are stored for her (and for anyone else with compatible ports installed in their head) in replayable cartridges. In the final story, “Afterworld,” girls from a Jewish orphanage who were murdered by Nazis survive decades later as ghosts in the visionary epileptic seizures of the one girl who survived them. If memories in these tales are like the Yangtze River town in “Village 113,” threatened with the forced forgetfulness of a man-made flood, they are also like the legendary sturgeon in “The River Nemunas,” which surfaces with an ancient, armor-covered dignity years after it was thought to have vanished.Grab A Copy Click here The title story in your collection grew out of an assignment from McSweeney’s to “travel somewhere in the world and imagine life there in 2024″ (as part of this special issue). I loved how your story dealt with the near future, with just a few small but fantastic details that seem like they could something of our time. How did you like writing fiction to an assignment like that?I loved it. It gave me permission to take a risk I had wanted to take, but worried I couldn?t pull off: namely, the idea that someone’s memories could someday be harvested, stored, and traded. A couple of years ago, I reviewed a book for the Boston Globe called What We Believe but Cannot Prove in which a neuroscientist named Terrence Sejnowski speculates that someday soon we might be able to locate specific memories in the “extracellular machinery” of our heads and stain them. I had been fascinated by that idea for months, primarily because it reminded me of hunting fossils: looking for one record in a world that generally does not allow such records. I had simultaneously been writing some (lousy) essays about my own memories of my grandmother’s descent into dementia. Grab A Copy Click here It wasn’t until McSweeney’s came calling that I gave myself permission to try to braid together a story all these enthusiasms: Alzheimer’s and grandma and fossils and South Africa.
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Just So Stories Hardcover Kipling