In its breadth and depth, Anthony Doerr's second collection--two novellas and four short stories--extends the impressive range displayed in his 2003 debut, The Shell Collector. Traversing settings from South Africa to Wyoming to Lithuania to suburban Cleveland, and time from the Holocaust to a near-term dystopian future, Doerr probes the subject of memory in evocative prose that enhances the richness of these consistently moving tales.
The two novellas that bookend the collection feature elderly women burdened by the pain and fragility of memory. The title story's protagonist lives in Johannesburg and, after a bizarre surgical procedure, undergoes periodic "harvesting" of memories that are then stored on cartridges to enable her to relive experiences slowly flaking away in dementia. She's targeted by a criminal who recruits a young "memory tapper" (an involuntary surgical subject himself) to scour these shards of recollection to discover the location of a priceless fossil found by the women's late husband. Here, Doerr subtly melds snapshots of the woman's life filtered through the perception of the young memory tapper with an absorbing mystery.
"Afterworld" is the tender story of Esther Gramm, spirited out of a Hamburg orphanage as a young girl in 1942 and spared the fate of 11 close friends in Birkenau. Now 81 years old and living in Ohio, she's taken by her grandson out of the hospital where doctors are treating a brain lesion that brings on powerful seizures, evoking dreamlike, occasionally nightmarish recollections of her long-dead companions. "We return to the places we're from," her grandson recalls on the story's emotionally charged final page. "We trample faded corners and pencil in new lines....You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come and dig it back up."
Two other highlights of Memory Wall share water as a metaphor. "Village 113" is the haunting, almost fable-like tale of an Asian village whose residents slowly abandon it ahead of its inundation for a dam project. Seen through the eyes of a woman known as the "seed keeper," whose son is a civil engineer committed to the project, the story expressively captures the tie between place and recollection. As the village's once vibrant life is stripped away piece by piece, it "drowns in memory" in every sense. In "The River Nemunas" a 15-year-old girl from Kansas, orphaned by the nearly simultaneous deaths of her parents, is sent to Lithuania to live with her grandfather, a carver of elaborate tombstones. In a manner reminiscent of Hemingway's Santiago, she bravely trolls the polluted river in a battered aluminum boat, seized by faith that she'll land a robust sturgeon, defying the locals' belief that the species long ago departed these waters.
Each of Anthony Doerr's captivating stories yields up ample pleasure on first reading and invites rereading to unearth new layers of meaning. Refracted through diverse prisms, they bear eloquent witness to the book's frank epigraph from Luis Buñuel: "Life without memory is no life at all."--Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: Anthony Doerr's second collection of stories is a brilliant exploration of the subject of memory and confirms his status as one of our most talented practitioners of the short form.