Hope is a silent revolution for the oppressed, as Yoko Ogawa's newly translated "The Memory Police" reveals. In the novel, originally published in 1994, Ogawa lays open a hushed defiance against a totalitarian regime by training her prodigious talent on magnifying the efforts of those who persistently but quietly rebel.
The book finds our unnamed narrator, a novelist on an unnamed island, dispassionately recording the gradual loss of objects and the memories associated with them. Disappeared items include the mundane, like calendars or candies; the precious, like emeralds or books; and the living, like roses or birds.
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