The story you have asked me to tell begins not with the ignominious ugliness of Lloyd's death but on a long-ago day in April when the sun seared my blistered face and I was nine years old and my father and mother sold me to a strange man. I say my father and my mother, but really it was just my mother.
Memory, the narrator of The Book of Memory, is an albino woman languishing in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she has been convicted of murder. As part of her appeal her lawyer insists that she write down what happened as she remembers it. The death penalty is a mandatory sentence for murder, and Memory is, both literally and metaphorically, writing for her life. As her story unfolds, Memory reveals that she has been tried and convicted for the murder of Lloyd Hendricks, her adopted father. But who was Lloyd Hendricks? Why does Memory feel no remorse for his death? And did everything happen exactly as she remembers?
Moving between the townships of the poor and the suburbs of the rich, and between the past and the present, Memory weaves a compelling tale of love, obsession, the relentlessness of fate and the treachery of memory.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Petina Gappah powerfully probes the tricksy nature of memory through the story of Memory, or Mnemosyne, an albino woman consigned to Chikurubi prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, convicted of murdering a wealthy white man, Lloyd, her adopted father...Gappah brilliantly exposes the gulf between rich and poor, for when Memory was nine years old her parents sold her to Lloyd and she moved from an impoverished township, Mufakose, to a grand house.
The novel is startlingly vivid: Memory recalls the taste of a stolen mango, the suffocating smell of camphor, strelitzia flowers blazing with colour. Most poignant of all is what she cannot remember, such as the pain of realising that she can no longer picture her dead sister's face. It's through tiny details that Gappah grapples with the grand themes of fate and free will, love and loss, the collision of tradition and modernity, the impact of politics on the personal. Yet withholding details also creates a thriller-like suspense...this is a moving novel about memory that unfolds into one about forgiveness, and a passionate paean to the powers of language.
Author: Anita Sethi Source: The ObserverThe stunning debut novel from the award-winning author of An Elegy for Easterly.
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