Memory wall: stories

In the half-dozen luminous stories collected here, Doerr explores the way memory shapes individual lives. In the deeply affecting title story, a South African woman suffering from dementia has had portals inserted into her skull. She is able to access her memories by plugging into cassette tapes of her experiences, which allows her to re-remember her past. She spends whole days plugged into her past, which becomes more real to her than the colorless present, but she is beset by a band of thieves out to steal her memories and sell them on the black market. In Afterworld, a woman at the end of her life suffers seizures that viscerally connect her to the girls she spent her childhood with in a Hamburg orphanage during the Nazi era. The way Doerr combines wondrous descriptions of the natural world with a rather bleak view of the human heart is a thread throughout these stories, all of which contain beautiful passages and vivid imagery. Both readers hungry for unconventional narratives and lovers of fine writing will find much to savor in this impressive collection.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist

In multiple O. Henry Prize-winner Doerr's latest (after Four Seasons in Rome), the presence and persistence of memory thematically binds stories set apart by vast distances of time and space. The title story finds a South African woman at the end of her life, taking part in a procedure that records her memories on cassettes; meanwhile, a pair of thieves rifles through the recordings, hoping to discover a secret her husband took to his grave. Bookending the collection is "Afterword," about a woman in her final days whose seizures take her back to her youth in a Nazi-era Hamburg orphanage. In between are a couple of domestic stories, one about a village's impending erasure by flood, and another about a teenage orphan adapting to life with her grandfather. Doerr has an incredible sense of language and a skill for crafting beautiful phrases and apt metaphors, but he doesn't always connect with his characters, a shortcoming most obvious in the first-person pieces. For the bulk of the collection, though, Doerr's prose brings home the weight of his troubling thesis, that "every hour... an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves." (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Suppose you've entered the foreign territory of senile dementia and a surgical procedure could charge your brain's damaged neurons and make your memories available to you once again. That's the supposition behind "Memory Wall," the title story of Doerr's compelling new collection and the metaphorical underpinning for the five stories that accompany it. But rest assured, this is not magical realism. No shape shifting or prestidigitation takes place in these intensely observed narratives, which capture what poet Elizabeth Bishop has called "a mind thinking." That mind could belong to a 15-year-old girl from Kansas getting off a plane in Lithuania with a poodle (memorably) named Mishap, a nonagenarian Holocaust survivor with a seizure disorder, or a fertility-challenged couple in Idaho who must document their every move and who may or may not have finally achieved their objective. Acclaimed author Doerr (The Shell Collector) is equally at home in long and short form, as his numerous O. Henry Awards and presence in anthologies attest. Verdict This book is a gift to the memory-impaired reader in all of us. Reading it will recharge your neurons and stimulate a few memories of its own.-Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A collection of six storiesat least one long enough to be considered a novellathat illustrate Doerr's sparse style, command of language and mastery of characterization.The title story, the most elaborate in the collection, features the "harvesting" of the memories of 74-year-old Alma Konachek, who lives in a suburb of Cape Town. Three years earlier her husband, Harold, died immediately after discovering a rare fossil in the Great Karoo, a desert region in South Africa. Because the find is valuable as well as rare, a "memory tapper" breaks into Alma's home, seeking the cartridges containing memories that have been harvested from wealthy people. While Luvo, the tapper, reviews the cartridges, the reader becomes aware of Alma's past home and family life as well as the tensions in her marriage. Eventually, Luvo and his mentor Roger find the right cartridge and are able to retrieve the fossil, something of a miracle since the late Harold Konachek is convinced that the only permanent thing is change. The next story, "Procreate, Generate," follows the heartbreaking story of Herb and Imogene, who after ten years of marriage decide they want children and are unable to conceive. The story almost reads like a documentary of their struggles with in vitro fertilization and the strain it places on their marriage. They finally conclude that "Nothingness is the rule. Life is the exception." In "The Demilitarized Zone," Doerr tells the story of an American soldier in Korea who buries a crane that hit a communications wire and almost gets court-martialed for his humanitarian act. In epistolary form, the story makes these implausible events both believable and moving. Doerr (Four Seasons in Rome, 2007, etc.) moves the reader gracefully from place to place (the stories span four continents), from incident to incident, and from memorable character to memorable character by focusing on small acts that have larger resonances. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

In the half-dozen luminous stories collected here, Doerr explores the way memory shapes individual lives. In the deeply affecting title story, a South African woman suffering from dementia has had portals inserted into her skull. She is able to access her memories by plugging into cassette tapes of her experiences, which allows her to re-remember her past. She spends whole days plugged into her past, which becomes more real to her than the colorless present, but she is beset by a band of thieves out to steal her memories and sell them on the black market. In "Afterworld," a woman at the end of her life suffers seizures that viscerally connect her to the girls she spent her childhood with in a Hamburg orphanage during the Nazi era. The way Doerr combines wondrous descriptions of the natural world with a rather bleak view of the human heart is a thread throughout these stories, all of which contain beautiful passages and vivid imagery. Both readers hungry for unconventional narratives and lovers of fine writing will find much to savor in this impressive collection. Copyright 2009 Booklist Reviews.

Suppose you've entered the foreign territory of senile dementia and a surgical procedure could charge your brain's damaged neurons and make your memories available to you once again. That's the supposition behind "Memory Wall," the title story of Doerr's compelling new collection and the metaphorical underpinning for the five stories that accompany it. But rest assured, this is not magical realism. No shape shifting or prestidigitation takes place in these intensely observed narratives, which capture what poet Elizabeth Bishop has called "a mind thinking." That mind could belong to a 15-year-old girl from Kansas getting off a plane in Lithuania with a poodle (memorably) named Mishap, a nonagenarian Holocaust survivor with a seizure disorder, or a fertility-challenged couple in Idaho who must document their every move and who may or may not have finally achieved their objective. Acclaimed author Doerr (The Shell Collector) is equally at home in long and short form, as his numerous O. Henry Awards and presence in anthologies attest. VERDICT This book is a gift to the memory-impaired reader in all of us. Reading it will recharge your neurons and stimulate a few memories of its own.—Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA

In multiple O. Henry Prize–winner Doerr's latest (after Four Seasons in Rome), the presence and persistence of memory thematically binds stories set apart by vast distances of time and space. The title story finds a South African woman at the end of her life, taking part in a procedure that records her memories on cassettes; meanwhile, a pair of thieves rifles through the recordings, hoping to discover a secret her husband took to his grave. Bookending the collection is "Afterword," about a woman in her final days whose seizures take her back to her youth in a Nazi-era Hamburg orphanage. In between are a couple of domestic stories, one about a village's impending erasure by flood, and another about a teenage orphan adapting to life with her grandfather. Doerr has an incredible sense of language and a skill for crafting beautiful phrases and apt metaphors, but he doesn't always connect with his characters, a shortcoming most obvious in the first-person pieces. For the bulk of the collection, though, Doerr's prose brings home the weight of his troubling thesis, that "every hour... an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves." (July)