Until the millennium, I read only one book at a time. I would finish Philip Roth’s American Pastoral before pouncing on my beloved Jane Austen’s Persusion.

Now it’s Liberty Hall here;  I have several books going at once. After too much screen time, I fall on my books like a graduate student with 1,000 pages to read before sunset: Moby Dick from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., Catullus from 10 to noon; Mrs. Dalloway from 1 p.m. to 2, and Don Quixote before crashing with a cozy mysery.

This week, I have chosen some excellent books. I chortled over Oliver Goldsmith’s witty play, She Stoops to Conquer (1773), and raced through the Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa’s dystopian novel, The Memory Police (2019).

I am mad about Goldsmith’s charming novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, and giggled uncontrollably over She Stoops to Conquer.  The plot pivots on a practical joke played by Tony Lumpkin, the doting Mrs. Hardwick’s son by her first husband. The smart-alec Tony declares his intention of going to the alehouse instead of  staying home to dine with two dinner guests, one of whom is a potential suitor for his half-sister, Miss Hardwicr.

Tony can’t wait to leave, but Mr. Hardwick doesn’t mind: he is tired of the havoc wrought by Tony, whose practical jokes include burning the footmen’s slippers and frightening the maids. But Mrs. Hardwick is concerned about Tony’s health:  she insists that he may be consumptive.

Mrs. Hardcastle:  The poor boy was always too sickly to do any good….  When he comes to be a little stronger, who know what a year or two’s Latin may do for him?

Hardcastle: Latin for him!  A cat and fiddle.  No, no, the alehouse and the stable are the only schools he’ll ever go to

Tony is lumpen, but he is also very funny.  When the Hardwicks’ visitors get lost and stop at the alehouse to ask directions, Tony directs them to the Hardwicks’ house, but tells them it is an inn.  Misdirection leads to mistaken identity:  The guests believe that Hardwick is the innkeeper. Later, the potential suitor mistakes Miss Hardcastle for a barmaid.

So enjoyable! 

On the other hand, we have Yoko Ogawa’s serious dystopian novel, The Memory Police, translated by Stephen Snyder, and a finalist for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award.  Published in English in 2019, it was first published in Japan in 1994.   And that puts it in dystopian context, I think. There are allusions to Orwell, Ray Bradbury, and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We.

Ogawa’s strange, spare, lyrical novel is a grim critique of fascism and police surveillance, which I read with fascination and horror. The Gestapo-like Memory Police interrogate anyone who stands out from the crowd, but they attack the entire population’s memories by “disappearing” random objects.  

The objects are “disappeared” for no reason: birds, ribbons, buttons, music boxes, bells, emeralds, stamps, and harmonicas.  One day all the rose petals blow into the sea, and there are no more rose gardens.   And there is a series of scary book=burning scenes, which allude to Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

The unnamed narrator – Ogawa does not name the characters – is a young novelist who lives alone.  She and a friend, referred to only as “the old man,” build a secret room beneath her study to hide her brilliant editor, R, from the Memory Police.

R tries to bolster their hopes as the tension builds. At one point the Memory Police searach the narrator’s house, but don’t find the secret room. Unlike other people on the island, R remembers all of the disappeared objects. But when he tries to explain the purpose of those objects, the narrator and the old man cannot understand, because their memories have been wiped and their feelings blocked.

There is a stillness about this novel: the people are quiet so as not to draw attention. And the spare style is perfect for the descriptions of the rise of stark, bleak chaos and fear. The narrator’s voice is unemotional, but we feel her terror.  We also get to read the novel she is writing, and it is a horror story, a kind of parallel fable. A typing teacher seduces and abuses the narrator, a typing student, and then locks her up in a room full of typewriters. He steals her voice: all the typewriters are broken, so she can’t even type. In some ways he stands in for the Memory Police in this alternate world.

Do I recommend this novel? Yes, but beware: it will haunt you. I have seldom been so disturbed by a book. In a way, there is magic realism at work, too, but it is not the charming magic realism we know from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude.