This book by Anthony Doerr includes seven short narratives focused on memory and historical events and how memories can reflect connected or severed relationships. Each chapter focuses on a different set of characters who face different struggles–dementia, poverty, racism, Anti-Semitism, and more–and how memory plays a role in their ability to deal with these struggles, and how it formulates relationships in the present. This book uses a level of detail and imagery so precise that the memories feel real, and the reader becomes accustomed to Doerr’s style of writing so quickly that the struggles the characters face are front and center. My favorite narrative included in Memory Wall is the first narrative, where a woman’s memories are made into cassette tapes that are watched by a young boy, seeking to see a memory where the woman’s husband makes a revolutionary fossil find. After seeing the memory, he is able to find the location in South Africa where the fossil is, and sends the money to the woman’s black housekeeper, who was being let go due to Apartheid.
Opening Line: “Seventy-four year old Alma Konachek lives in Vredehoek, a suburb above Cape Town: a place of warm rains, big-windowed lofts, and silent, predatory automobiles.”
Favorite Line: “We return to the places we’re from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines.”
Why I Like It: The narratives are succinct and to the point, yet utilize a level of detail that makes the reader feel transported to whatever place Doerr places the reader in–suburbs in South Africa to a village in East Asia to a rural Midwest town to New Jersey.
Read If You Like: Short stories, historical narratives, short reads that you can’t put down.