Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020, an enthralling Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance from one of Japan's greatest writers.
'Beautiful... Haunting' Sunday Times
'A dreamlike story of dystopia' Jia Tolentino
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Hat, ribbon, bird rose.
To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed.
When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn't forget, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?
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Finalist for the National Book Award 2019
Longlisted for the Translated Book Award 2020
New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year
'This timeless fable of control and loss feels more timely than ever' Guardian, Books of the Year
'Echoes the themes of George Orwell's 1984, but it has a voice and power all its own' Time
'A novel that makes us see differently... A masterpiece' Madeleine Thien
Rezensionen / Stimmen
The Memory Police is a masterpiece: a deep pool that can be experienced as fable or allegory, warning and illumination. It is a novel that makes us see differently, opening up its ideas in inconspicuous ways, knowing that all moments of understanding and grace are fleeting. It is political and human, it makes no promises. It is a rare work of patient and courageous vision -- Madeleine Thien * Guardian * It's an age since I read a book as strange, beautiful and affecting... this haunting work reaches beyond...to examine what it is to be human... a remarkable writer * Sunday Times * Masterly...Like Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, Yoko Ogawa's novel transforms a familiar metaphor into imaginative truth. -- Jia Tolentino * The New Yorker * In a feat of dark imagination, Yoko Ogawa stages an intimate, suspenseful drama of courage and endurance while conjuring up a world that is at once recognizable and profoundly strange * Wall Street Journal * Explores questions of power, trauma and state surveillance...particularly resonant now, at a time of rising authoritarianism across the globe. * New York Times, pick of the month * The fresh take on 1984 you didn't know you needed. * Washington Post * This is a work of immense precision that is drawing on allegory, that is drawing on myth, that is drawing on dystopia and is doing that deftly. It is the work of a Japanese master who transcends her cultural context to speak to us on a level that is universal. The acclaimed Japanese writer's fifth English release is an elegantly spare dystopian fable...Reading The Memory Police is like sinking into a snowdrift: lulling yet suspenseful, it tingles with dread and incipient numbness. * New York Times Book Review * Ogawa exploits the psychological complexity of...[a] bizarre situation to impressive effect... her achievement is to weave in a far more personal sense of the destruction and distortion of the psyche * Observer * One of Japan's most acclaimed authors explores truth, state surveillance and individual autonomy. Ogawa's fable echoes the themes of George Orwell's 1984, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, but it has a voice and power all its own. * TIME Magazine, Best Books of Summer 2019 *
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Produkt-Hinweis
Maße
Höhe: 197 mm
Breite: 128 mm
Dicke: 22 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-78470-044-7 (9781784700447)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space and Zoetrope. Her works include The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris and Revenge. Her most recent novel, The Memory Police, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Stephen Snyder is a translator and professor of Japanese Studies at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA.
He has translated works by Kenzaburo Oe, Ryu Murakami, and Miri Yu, among others. His translation of Natsuo Kirino's Out was a finalist for the Edgar Award for best mystery novel in 2004, and his translation of Yoko Ogawa's Hotel Iris was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011.?
