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The Memory Of Love (2010)

by Aminatta Forna(Favorite Author)

3.83 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1408808137 (ISBN13: 9781408808139)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Bloomsbury UK

review 1: With this book you will dive into Sierra Leone. I had never given the place much thought, and the book has made me ashamed of that. The book also unfolds much to think on around the themes of memory, trauma and hope. As the story starts to wind down, as the threads start to draw together, I was at first disappointed by some of the melodramatic touches. There is perhaps something salutary for a reader like me, who has no personal experience of Sierra Leone, or of Africa to see familiar characters patterned in a new setting, and to contemplate seriously whether people there are governed by the same hopes and horrors that are so basic to me as to seem clichéd. Indeed, cliché and melodrama may be too limiting as terms. What people live through and recount in this book are mo... morements of tangled desire, and the terror unspeakable. Tragic circumstances write large the smaller feelings of life under the rule of law, and the stories here sound familiar because they tap the impulse and the action of mythology. Tragic stories-- I mean this as in "Greek tragedy"-- sound clichéd and melodramatic when we close our minds to all but outline, when we harden ourselves against feeling alongside other human beings.
review 2: A bit slow and frustrating (you just get going with one story and have to patiently wade through the next chapter on the second story or narrative before getting back to the other one - sure, they interconnect but it takes a long time for them to do so). Also very grim subject matter, with reference to awful crimes and trauma from a horrendous civil war. Two of the three main characters were unlikeable. However the writing was beautiful and clever, the characters were very realistic, the stories were subtly gripping and I feel like my understanding has been broadened by this novel, set in a place far removed from my personal realities. less

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