Fiction Recommend: Memory Wall

Memory Wall

Anthony Doerr

267 Pages

Scribner, 2011

One day about a year ago, I was riffling through books in the fiction paperback section at Barnes & Noble, a bit bored, none of the passages I read piquing my interest, when I opened a book titled The Shell Seekers. I turned to a page somewhere in the middle, picked a passage at random, and began to read. I don’t remember precisely what the particular paragraph was about (other than that it was nature-related), but I do remember my startling reaction to it: the unconscious holding of my breath, the delicious chill that rippled down my spine. I had a visceral response to the words I was reading, the kind you get when discovering an unbearably beautiful line of poetry or music that is so eloquent it hurts.

I bought the book of course. And that’s how I was introduced to the work of Anthony Doerr.

Doerr manipulates language in an entirely novel way. His new story collection, Memory Wall, is rife with the same types of glorious passages I’d breathlessly salivated over in Barnes & Noble that day. It’s as if he sculpts every sentence individually, turning each word over and over in his mind till he pinpoints the mot juste, that single word that articulates his meaning as no other word possibly could. An exercise in perfection.

Memory Wall is comprised of seven short stories. Their unifying theme is memory, but the stories, as well as the settings (Pre WWII Europe; Ohio; South Africa; Russia) are entirely dissimilar. In the title story, a woman with Alzheimer’s takes part in an experimental procedure to preserve her memories. A young South African orphan becomes the owner of those memories, seeing and experiencing vignettes of her life. “Procreate, Generate” brings us into the hearts of a married couple trying to conceive, makes us feel, almost as if we ourselves are the protagonists, the hope and sorrow and complexity of the experience. In “The Afterworld,” a Holocaust survivor living in modern day Ohio remains haunted by her memories. And in “The River Nemunas,” a story so intense and moving and poignant it lingers in your brain long after you’ve finished reading it, a 15-year-old girl, orphaned of mother and father within three months, finds solace in a river, in the company of a dying woman, and in life itself.

Part of what makes a Doerr story so compelling are the infinitesimal details in the descriptions. So that not only are we being drawn into the characters’ lives, but we are also, for example, getting a lesson on archaeology and fossils. And if you knew nothing about the Three Gorges Dam (as I didn’t), you get the equivalent of a condensed course on its creation in the story “Village 113.”

One of my creative writing professors used to ask the class, “What is this story about?” And we’d say, “It’s about a dog dying” or “It’s about a community collapsing” or whatever it was the story’s plot referred to. Then the professor would say, “Now tell me what the story is about.” Doerr’s stories are about a woman’s memories disappearing and a boy fighting a war overseas while his parents’ marriage is disintegrating and an entire village being swallowed up by a government project. But what they’re about is love, sorrow, hope, intimacy, fear, pain, loneliness and all the imponderables of life itself. 

“What is memory anyway? How can it be such a frail, perishable thing?” reads a passage in Memory Wall. “Remember a memory often enough and you can create a new memory, the memory of remembering.”

Memory Wall. 267 Pages. Nowhere near enough.