"Memory Wall" by Anthony Doerr (Fourth Estate, 2012)

I was disappointed by the title story. It's set near Cape Town in a world where, anachronistically (as SF as Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never let me go"), memories can be extracted from minds, stored in cartridges, then replayed in the mind of the original donor or someone else. Alma has dementia and has paid to have thousands of her memories harvested.

She reaches for the photo of Harold and fingers its corner a moment. "Sometimes," she says, "I have trouble remembering things." Behind her, our the window, the fog cycles and cycle. The sky is invisible. The neighbor's rooftops are gone. The garden is gone. Everything is white. "I know, Mrs. Alma," Pheko says. (p.43)

There's a black market for cartridges. Levo has broken into Alma's house and has relived many of the old lady's memories. He has discovered where her late husband found a valuable fossil. He wanders alone in the wilderness for days (a literary trend) seeking the location. While doing so, other memories return and analogies burst in

• Remember a memory often enough and you can create a new memory, the memory of remembering (p.71)
• For a fossil to happen is a miracle. One in fifty million. The rest of us? We disappear into the grass, into beetles, into worms. Into ribbons of light (p.71)

Doerr typically uses lists to accumulate detail - Pheko gets off at Site C and hurries along a line of shanties in the rain. Windchimes tinkle. A goat picks its way through puddles. Torpid men perch on fenders of gutted taxis or upended fruit crates or beneath ragged tarps. Someone a few alleys over lights a firework and it blooms and fades over the rooftops (p.15). I didn't like the "Nightmare" section.

"Procreate, Generate" is just another "trying to have a baby" story. That too mentions memories that struggle to embed - "All morning she sits at her computer and drowns in memory ... "No parents, no husband, no children," a blind woman once told her. Her gaze was a vacuum. Imogene did not know where to look. "I am a tribe of one."" (p.94).

In "The Demilitarized Zone" the main character lives in the US. His father has Alzheimer's. His son is serving near Seoul and doesn't know that his parents have separated. The son writes a letter to his father about how "two cranes came soaring out of the DMZ, as silent as gods. They were maybe forty feet away when one hit a communications wire and went down". I presume the birds part-symbolise his parents. The son picked the bird up. It died and he buried it without permission - "Unauthorized Absence, AWOL". He's not court-martialed. He's flown home, ill.

In "Village 113" a Chinese village will be flooded because of a dam project. An old woman doesn't want to leave. "Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it is a village slated to be inundated" (p.131). Later, "Every stone, every stair, is a key to a memory" (p.146). The job of her son who lives in a big city is to clear the villages somehow or other.

"The River Nnemunas" begins "My name is Allison. I'm fifteen years old. My parents are dead. I have a poodle named Mishap in a pet carrier between my ankles and a biography of Emily Dickinson in my lap" (p.157). She's going to live with her Lithuanian grandfather. She befriends a slightly senile old lady. She tried to convince people that there are sturgeons in the river. Later she wonders "about how memories can be here one minute and then gone the next" (p.175).

"Afterworld" (my favourite story of the book) flips between 2 time-lines: Ester at 6 (a Jewish orphan in Hamburg), and Ester at 81 in the USA. Her grandson Robert is recording interviews for his history thesis. She's increasingly epileptic and goes into hospital - "A plastic EEG recording cap, studded with dozens of wired electrodes, is installed on her head" (p.203) (harking back to "Memory Wall") "... the drugs make her feel as if she looks out at her room through flooded googles" (p.204). Dr Rosenbaum helped little Ester escape to the States, and Robert helps her discharge herself from hospital. "Memory becomes her enemy" (p.235). After Ester's been dead for a while, "Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, survey territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade" (p.242)

In "The Deep" a boy born in Detroit, 1914, has a heart condition which means he's not expected to live much beyond his 18th birthday. To relax he's told to think of something blue. A girl takes a fancy to him and gets him to pump air down to her while she explores the bottom of a lake. Times are hard. His mother leaves him when he's 18. When he's 21 he meets his childhood sweetheart again. She has a baby. He thinks its eyes will be blue.

In the Acknowledgments he writes "watching [my mother] care for her mother taught me about patience, love, and the fragility of memory".

Other reviews

• Justine Jordan ("Memory Wall" and "Afterworld", which also takes a sideways view of an old woman's memories, are the stand-out pieces in the collection. … apart from the tendency to show his workings, this collection is an impressively rich and nuanced consideration of memory, time and loss. Doerr is a lusciously good stylist whose inner journeys and outer travels are equally fascinating to follow. )
• Terrence Rafferty (“It’s the rarest thing, Luvo thinks, that gets preserved, that does not get erased, broken down, transformed.” That, in a way, is the theme of every story in “Memory Wall.” ... He’s one of those rare writers able to turn idiosyncrasies, even outright flaws, into virtues. Everything, in the end, becomes evidence of a temperament, a way of looking at the world, that isn’t quite like anybody else’s. If Doerr chooses to overelaborate his metaphors, it’s perhaps because he doesn’t want us to waste time figuring them out ourselves )
• David Evans
• Jessica Freeman-Slade (Sometimes the metaphors Doerr employs are a bit trite—yes, fossils represent memories, we may have seen this coming—but each perspective is so genuinely articulated that snark doesn’t seem necessary. It is rare to find an author whose voice feels artless and sincere; even if the story might feel predictable, we have to applaud his guilelessness)

"The Shell Collector" by Anthony Doerr (flamingo, 2003)

I wasn't so impressed by "The Shell Collector" though there were signs of promise. I've seen "The Hunter's Wife" before. I still like it. As early as paragraph 2 the style becomes clear

Now it was dark. The airplane descended over Chicago, its galaxy of electric lights, the vast neighborhoods coming clearer as the plane glided toward the airport - streetlights, headlights, stacks of buildings, ice rinks, a truck turning at a stoplight, scraps of snow atop a warehouse and winking antennae on faraway hills, finally the long converging parallels of blue runway lights, and they were down

Later the main character watches a magic show through a window -

She was beautiful to him in a way that nothing else had ever been beautiful. Snow blew down his collar and drifted around his boots. The wind had fallen off but the snow came hard and still the hunter stood riveted at the window. After some time the magician rejoined the severed box halves, unfastened the buckles, and fluttered his wand, and she was whole again. She climbed out of the box and curtsied in the glittering slit-legged dress. She smiled as if it were the Resurrection itself. Then the storm brought down a pine tree in front of the courthouse and the power winked out, streetlight by streetlight, all over town. Before she could move, before ushers began escorting the crowd out with flashlights, the hunter was slinking into the hall, making for the stage, calling for her.

There's lyricism, and descriptions that expand into duration - "streetlight by streetlight". Rich and evocative or "death by chocolate"? I'd say rich. It's intense about moments and manages to cover memories of a relationship in the course of a formal event.

"So many chances", about a 14 y.o. girl whose family moves to the sea, has clipped, staccato sections

Then she sees the fisherman. Just to her left. Wading. As if he came from nowhere. From nothing. From the sea itself. She watches him. Feels lucky to watch. The world peeled back and left with only this vision. This silent flying wizardry. The rod seems an extension of his arm, an extra and perfect appendage, his shoulder pivoting, his bare brown chest, his legs tapering to calves buried in the sea. So this is Maine, this is how it can be, she thinks. This fisherman. This grace.

At times the lyricism is channelled through the girl, but even so, it's a bit much

In the morning she drags her mother to the sea by the wrist. To confront her with the sea dressed in fog. To show her that this place is not empty. Wings of mist drag through the treetops. The fog shreds everywhere; flashes of pure blue wink above. The sea undressing. A wide-brimmed hat crammed over her mother's hair. Gulls turn in a high noisy wheel above the gliding tide. Cormorants dive for breakfast.

"For a Long Time This Was Griselda's Story" has an interesting set-piece (the performance) but not much else. "July Fourth" is fun, but that's all. In "The Caretaker" the description of how he cares for his garden is as meticulous as that of him burying hearts, and as believable. But if his garden is too tidy it will be discovered, and so will he. There's sign language, and the language of whales. Tenderness and ruthlessness - my second favourite storyin the book. "A Tangle by the Rapid River" is too light, yet it has the heaviest sentence - The pocked and mudded logging roads - four unmarked turns, fording a stone-choked creek and the truck gurgling, warning, pressing over slick clay, beneath the clear-cut hillsides, stacks of limbless birch in bound rolls on the road flanks and hacked from the dim tangle of woods, savage mudferns and rust-stalked blackberry (p.176). "Mkondo" was rather plain too.

Lots of snow, fishing, and women in touch with nature, of lone males lost in a wilderness. Lots of descriptive lists, e.g. -

• Ohio: bleak weather impended over the city like a shroud. Curtains of haze washed out the light; helicopters shuttled endlessly overhead; buses groaned through the streets like dying beasts (p.195)
• the museum was not what she expected - cracked granite staircases, mounted mammals and bones on display, dioramas where plastic-eyed cavemen bent over plaster cookfires (p.196).

Other reviews

• Alfred Hickling (Guardian) (The highlight, however, is the concluding story, "Mkondo", which draws together all of Doerr's themes of geographical displacement, disappointed love and lack of spiritual fulfilment. ...Whether he can realise his ambition and sustain these themes over a larger span remains to be seen, but for now he stands unchallenged as a great American malacologist. )
• Kirkus Review (But even this excellent story is dwarfed by “The Caretaker,” ... This is one of the great contemporary stories)
• Yale Review of Books (Listing allows Doerr to convey a large amount of information in a small space or to describe years in a few instants. It is the device on which many of these stories hinge: an economy of words used to portray the passing of time. Doerr can describe intervening years in a sentence or two and then move ahead to focus on a particularly important moment in paragraphs of vivid detail. ... Since he deals with such a disparate set of locations and stories, it is odd that Doerr seems to recycle imagery throughout the collection ... Another of Doerr’s obsessions is intestines, and in particular the words “viscera” and “eviscerate,” which appear repeatedly throughout the collection. ... Even if its other stories were not breathtaking and beautiful, which they are, and even if its characters did not introduce the reader to a host of captivating lives, which they do, The Shell Collector would be valuable for its longest and most ambitious story, “The Caretaker.”)
• Margaret Gunning ("For A Long Time This was Griselda's Story" is a rather silly and superficial yarn ... This is not the only clanger. "July Fourth," about a fishing contest between Americans and Brits, never rises above the level of glib entertainment. Similarly, "A Tangle by the Rapid River" (yet another fishing story, about an old man cheating on his wife) lacks real depth, coming across as empty writer's card tricks. ... the last story ,"Mkondo," misses the mark due to sheer repetition of themes. ... Given his enormous potential as a fiction writer and his relative youth, it seems strange and a bit disturbing that in a collection of only eight stories, Doerr is already repeating himself.)
• Leah Falk (the gorgeousness of “The Caretaker” is that ravaged maps of both the human world and the human mind don’t inspire pity or relief at our better lot, but bring us closer to a strange reality that isn’t so alternate at all, that suddenly doesn’t seem so far from us.)

"About Grace" by Anthony Doerr (Harper Perennial, 2005)

David is haunted by recurrent dreams. Some turn out to be premonitions. When the dreams predict a death he burns all boats trying to save a life. But sometimes the dreams are only dreams. I thought initially that this gift of his might make the plot too SF-ish. The events aren't frequent though - they help introduce memory and destiny as themes. Water - floods, oceans, clouds and snow - is another theme. He flees from problems. At the end he seeks his wife and daughter.

There are bursts of description - e.g. p.195

Flight attendants collected cups and newspapers; passengers levered their seats forward. From the window he watched the city of Miami assemble itself: antennas and rooftops gliding into view, two trucks like toys curling through a freeway exit, a green band of smog hovering over the shoreline. A crowded marina scrolled past, each boat's windshield in turn reflecting the sun.

or this on p.316

Graves were adorned with American flags or plastic wreaths or nothing at all. New saplings had been planted in the dead midpoint of several plots, aspens, spruce, a few dogwoods. From the branch of one dangled a miniature biplane fashioned from pieces of Budweiser cans, rotating slowly on its tether of monofilament

Remembrance is easily provoked. On receiving a letter from someone starting at university (p.189), he goes to the beach -

He went to sea one last time in a rowboat. He lay across the thwarts and felt the water raise the boat and set it back down, and stared at the sky a long time. The day he left for college his father had waited on the landing, a string of smoke rising from a cigarette in his fingers. ... This was how he had finished out his days: brokenhearted; smoke suspended around him like grief; settling into the rituals of newspaper stories - lost hunters, plane crashes, basketball scores - wheeling dollies of milk into the backs of stores. He turned the boat and rowed back. The sun was over Souriere and the sea was drenched with light. He paused a minute and feathered the oars and let them drip.

It's not until p.304 that we learn about his mother's deathbed scene, which brings together snow, animals, windows and loss.

It's a page-turner, though in retrospect the section set in winter in an Alaskan hut could have been edited away. At the end the threads are brought together in a rush, novelistically.

Other reviews

• Kirkus Review (But it’s much too long, and is significantly marred by its climactic momentum toward a reconciliation that simply isn’t very credible. Its protagonist’s loneliness, regret, and guilt are painfully palpable, and go a long way toward making this risky book work - but, in the end, aren’t enough.)
• Publisher's Weekly (This is a lyrical tale tuned a bit too fine: Doerr's dreamy prose accords more attention to nature than character, so that Winkler, transfixed by the wonders of water and snowflakes but singularly unreflective about his actual life, is a frustratingly opaque protagonist. There are gorgeous moments here, but a stifling lack of story)
• Neel Mukherjee (New York Times) (too much brightness dazzles and distracts, and the wall of luminous prose almost fences off the reader's heart, something Doerr clearly wants to sway. A writer as dizzyingly talented and as generous as Doerr should be confident enough to do away with some of the more blinding fireworks)