Introduction

In the wise and beautiful second collection from the acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning #1 New York Times bestselling author of All the Light We Cannot See, "Doerr writes about the big questions, the imponderables, the major metaphysical dreads, and he does it fearlessly" (The New York Times Book Review).

Set on four continents, Anthony Doerr's new stories are about memory, the source of meaning and coherence in our lives, the fragile thread that connects us to ourselves and to others. Every hour, says Doerr, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear. Yet at the same time children, surveying territory that is entirely new to them, push back the darkness, form fresh memories, and remake the world.

In the luminous and beautiful title story, a young boy in South Africa comes to possess an old woman's secret, a piece of the past with the power to redeem a life. In "The River Nemunas," a teenage orphan moves from Kansas to Lithuania to live with her grandfather, and discovers a world in which myth becomes real. "Village 113," winner of an O'Henry Prize, is about the building of the Three Gorges Dam and the seed keeper who guards the history of a village soon to be submerged. And in "Afterworld," the radiant, cathartic final story, a woman who escaped the Holocaust is haunted by visions of her childhood friends in Germany, yet finds solace in the tender ministrations of her grandson.

Every story in Memory Wall is a reminder of the grandeur of life--of the mysterious beauty of seeds, of fossils, of sturgeon, of clouds, of radios, of leaves, of the breathtaking fortune of living in this universe. Doerr's language, his witness, his imagination, and his humanity are unparalleled in fiction today.

Editorial Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2010: Books made of linked stories, like recent award-winning favorites Olive Kitteridge and Let the Great World Spin, are usually connected by shared places and people. The tender and lyrical stories in Anthony Doerr's Memory Wall are linked no less strongly, but, as if Oliver Sacks had turned to fiction, by a neurological theme. Set as far apart as South Africa and the Korean DMZ, Doerr's stories circle around the central pull of memory, both the struggle against memory's loss and the weight of memories that remain. In the long and brilliantly intricate title story, as memories fade from an aging white woman in suburban Cape Town, they are stored for her (and for anyone else with compatible ports installed in their head) in replayable cartridges. In the final story, "Afterworld," girls from a Jewish orphanage who were murdered by Nazis survive decades later as ghosts in the visionary epileptic seizures of the one girl who survived them. If memories in these tales are like the Yangtze River town in "Village 113," threatened with the forced forgetfulness of a man-made flood, they are also like the legendary sturgeon in "The River Nemunas," which surfaces with an ancient, armor-covered dignity years after it was thought to have vanished. --Tom Nissley

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A Q&A with Anthony Doerr

Amazon.com: The title story in your collection grew out of an assignment from McSweeney's to "travel somewhere in the world and imagine life there in 2024" (as part of this special issue). I loved how your story dealt with the near future, with just a few small but fantastic details that seem like they could something of our time. How did you like writing fiction to an assignment like that?

Doerr: I loved it. It gave me permission to take a risk I had wanted to take, but worried I couldn’t pull off: namely, the idea that someone's memories could someday be harvested, stored, and traded. A couple of years ago, I reviewed a book for the Boston Globe called What We Believe but Cannot Prove in which a neuroscientist named Terrence Sejnowski speculates that someday soon we might be able to locate specific memories in the "extracellular machinery" of our heads and stain them. I had been fascinated by that idea for months, primarily because it reminded me of hunting fossils: looking for one record in a world that generally does not allow such records. I had simultaneously been writing some (lousy) essays about my own memories of my grandmother's descent into dementia. It wasn't until McSweeney's came calling that I gave myself permission to try to braid together a story all these enthusiasms: Alzheimer's and grandma and fossils and South Africa.

Amazon.com: South Africa isn't the only far-flung place you write about in this book, much like your previous collection, The Shell Collector: you also set stories in China, Korea, Germany, and Estonia (and, yes, Wyoming). Do you always have to visit a place to imagine a story there, and to imagine the memories its inhabitants might hold?

Doerr: Not always. Sometimes a place can be so real, so brimming-over with color and noise and detail, that trying to figure out which details to select for a piece of fiction can be overwhelming. Ultimately I'm trying to write stories inside which a reader is transported; I want readers to have an experience that allows them to enter the time and place and life of someone else. And I want that experience of empathy to be continuous; I don't want the dream of the fiction to be broken by any carelessness on my part. That's the most I can hope for: that a reader might leave his or her world for an hour or two and enter the world of one of my characters. And if a reader is going to be nice enough to read one of my stories, it's up to me to make that world as convincing and seamless as possible. So, certainly, travel can help bring a place to life: its smells, its skies, its birds, its light. In the best case scenario, I start a story set somewhere I have visited previously, and then, once the story is mostly drafted, I return to the place to harvest whatever last details I can find.

Amazon.com: Many of your stories are about very private and personal experiences of some of our most public and collective dramas: the Holocaust, the aftermath of apartheid, the flooding of the Yangtze. Is that gap between public and private memory one of the engines for your fiction?

Doerr: Yes, yes, yes. We tend to believe history is about collective memory, about voiceovers and textbooks and pop quizzes, but for me history is about individuals. The glory and genius of The Diary of Anne Frank, for example, is in the ordinary, quotidian day-to-day detailing of the writing: the things they eat, the jokes they tell. The horror comes through because of the mundanity. I read that book when I was fourteen, the same age as Anne, and the lessons of that little diary have stayed with me: first, that through books, the memories of the dead can live; and second, that the path to the universal is through the individual. Only through the smallest details, through the sights and smells and sounds of one person's moment-by-moment experience, can a writer convey the immensity that is a human life.

Amazon.com: Publishers don't quite know what to do with novellas, but many of my very favorite stories fall into that in-between length. What do you like about working within its boundaries? Are there novellas you love? Perhaps the great novella of the English language, Joyce's "The Dead," is also one of the great memory tales. Is there something about that size that suits storytelling about memory?

Doerr: I love long stories and novellas. They can manage to be bigger than slice-of-life short stories, stories that compress or truncate lives as so many contemporary short stories tend to. In a novella you can work with bigger scales, with a character's birth and death, and with his or her memories. And, yet, because of their relative brevity, because a reader can read a novella in a single day, on a single airplane flight, they can often be more intense, more involving, and more shattering than novels.

That said, you’re right, writing them can be scary, because only a very brave publisher is going to produce a book that's less than 150 pages long, and only a very brave magazine is going to run a story longer than 30 pages. So as a writer you feel yourself plunge off a small cliff when you hit about 10,000 words and realize you have 10,000 to go. 

At first you might be scared, anyway, but soon afterward there's a certain release. You think: This thing I'm making is not going to sell for a pile of money, this is not my Big Novel; it's just a novella, and I'm going to take whatever risks I want to with it. 

I'm actually very interested in how e-readers like the Kindle are going to change the way writers work and readers read. Theoretically, it could be much easier for a publishing house to take a chance on a novella if they don't have to pay for the production costs. Who knows, maybe short stories and novellas are tailor-made for the electronic medium?

Novellas I love? My absolute favorite is Katherine Anne Porter's "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" (though, interestingly, in her introduction to her collected stories, Porter insists that "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" be called a "long story"). And of course Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych, which everyone should read once every ten years.  And of course, "The Dead", as you mentioned. As for living writers, I love Andrea Barrett's "Ship Fever" and "Servants of the Map" and a little known one by Denis Johnson called "Train Dreams" that I encountered in the 2003 O. Henry Prize Stories.

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Excerpt

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Discussion Questions

1. The characters in Anthony Doerr's stories are different ages, live on four different continents, and have diverse life experiences. How are they similar? Which universal themes about memory are contained in each story?

2. In the story “Memory Wall,” memories can literally be found in cartridges that are produced at the memory clinic. What other manifestations do memories take throughout the stories, both physical and otherwise?

3. Given the subjective nature of recollections, how accurate or true-to-life do you think the memories that have been implanted in Alma’s cartridges are? Do you think the cartridges are ultimately helpful to Alma? Do they bring her happiness? Can the erasure of memories in old age ever be avoided?

4. On page 42 Alma tells Pheko, “To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.” Do you agree? Do the various items on Alma’s memory wall support her claim? How do the items on Alma’s memory wall create a narrative for her life?

5. Alma has a special cartridge, number 4510, that Pheko plays for her often. If you could transfer your own memories to cartridges that you could replay in your mind, would you? Why or why not? Do you have particular memories that you’d like to experience over and over again?

6. Alma was perplexed by Harold’s interest in fossils, yet she goes to great lengths to hold on to her memories. What do you think drew Harold to the study and collection of fossils? How are fossils like human memories? How does nature as a whole contain remembrances of our collective past?

7. Alma is a product of a society that for generations upheld the laws and prejudices of apartheid. Do you feel any kind of sympathy for Alma? Why or why not?

8. In “Procreate, Generate,” both Imogene and Herb desperately want to have a child. In the context of memory, why do you think having a baby is so important to them? Particularly to Imogene?

9. In the soldier’s mind in “The Demilitarized Zone,” life at home goes on as usual while he is deployed in Korea. How do his impressions of home differ from the reality of his parents’ estrangement? How might the soldier's experiences in Korea match up or diverge with his grandfather's memories of his own time there?

10. The planned submersion of the village in “Village 113” promises to obliterate memories of an entire way of life. On page 135, Li Qing writes to his mother, “You don’t have to remain loyal to one place all your life.” How much does place matter in the keeping of traditions? What are some ways to prevent this destruction of the village's collective memories, even after the dam has been built and its inhabitants have moved away?

11. On page 151 of “Village 113”, the seed keeper thinks, “What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?” Discuss this metaphor of a seed as a link to the past.

12. What do you think the sturgeon in “The River Nemunas” represents? Why is it so important for Allison to catch one and to convince her grandfather that they can still be found in the river?

13. Esther’s epileptic fits in “Afterworld” allow her to revisit the ghosts of her past in the present, prompting her to think that “Maybe not every disease is a deficit, a taking away. Maybe what’s happening to her is an opening, a window, a migration.” (p. 224) Do you agree? Do you think her spells allow her to finally find closure and move past her survivor’s guilt?

14. On the final page of Memory Wall, the author writes, "Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new." How does this quote apply to the stories in this collection? - See more at: http://books.simonandschuster.com/Memory-Wall/Anthony-Doerr/9781439182840/reading_group_guide#rgg

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