The Common Reader
Well-known member
I have a different take on Yoko Ogawa. And I can only, unfortunately, read her in translation. I found nothing prurient about the short sharp shock of Hotel Iris despite its graphic sadomasochistic subject matter. The novel is a gripping account of an unlikely encounter between two very damaged people. Among the things that linger in the mind after putting the book down is that rare feeling that not a single word was wasted.What is more representative of Ogawa's work? Because everything I've read has been very bad. At least by comparison The Housekeeper and the Professor seemed vaguely literary. I mean sure, she may have better stuff that's untranslated but Hotel Iris and Revenge were both 1/5 books me to and read like generic kink/bondage/spooky story junk. I can't imagine her remaining untranslated works are all vastly different in quality and subject matter.
The Memory Police fell flat for me in the same way that Samanta Schweblin's Little Eyes did, subject matter on authoritarianism and surveillance that's been beaten to death and isn't even remotely new being regurgitated in a way that's hardly profound or moving. It was clunky and most of its supposedly grand ideas seemed blatantly ripped out of a high school freshman English reading list (1984, Fahrenheit 451). Most Black Mirror episodes on Netflix do what this book was trying to do better.
Memory Police is absorbing in an entirely different way. The spareness of Ogawa’s prose is eerily suggestive of a dystopian island where entire categories of objects randomly disappear from the consciousness of most of the island’s inhabitants.
Le musée du silence, the French translation of Chinmoku hakubutsukan, a novel to my knowledge not yet available in English, involves a collection of objects, each of which was taken from its former owner after his/her death.
In each of these books, a psychological or metaphysical quandary is matched by an acute sense of the physical world in which Ogawa’s characters live.
I certainly hope she is on the Nobel committee’s radar.