I always tend to return to authors whose storytelling mesmerized me. Lisa Ko´s The Leavers remained with me for a very long time, therefore, seven years after, reading Memory Piece was a long awaited bookish step.
It is a very different disruptive read. The first time - my favorite - focus on Asian-American artist Giselle, mostly self taught and living art as a way of being. She is living in the meta-existential level of the artistic conscience becase she cannot exist otherwise. She experiments with life at a different level - her project, Memory Piece, is aimed at spending seven hours a day for a year for writing down her memories; in the end, she will burn down the notebooks -, she needs/has to check the other side of existence, driven away from the mundane by a fire that doesn´t allow her to consumate her life otherwise. Sex is casual, eating is circumstancial, family relationships are a given. And then she disappears, when it becomes automatism, taken away with the capitalistic forceps.
From the end of the 1990s to 2040s, her other two childhood friends, Ellen and Jackie may follow different pathways, but driven by a similar spirit. Jackie is a tech entrepreneur, experiencing the Internet golden era until they realized the audacity of automation and tech concerns. She will join Ellen - physically and sexually - who lives in an encampment in NYC, running constant evictions.
The NYC at the end of the novel is dystopic, simplistically integrated into a large state surveillance network, non-democratic. It is a pitty that the dystopic details weren´t not too much exposed and explained, because expediting them brings only ideological wishful thinking instead of a literary intervention. It is normal to be afraid of a dictatorial society - American, French, Italian, nationality doesn´t matter - but I am intellectually curious to understand how it may affect my freedom of mind in the smallest details. I, personally, I cannot see the future in very clear terms, but I expect to see it through the eyes of someone gifted with much more imagination than mine´s.
As a story and clash of ideas however, Memory Piece is a very intelligent story, particularly in respect to the visions of arts and artists. The characters as well as their specific identity details are very important to represent and understand them. Storytelling in this respect remains the same and was delighted to read this book, although delight may be considered a quasi capitalistic habit.
But forgive me for not being able to fully imagine how life may look life nowadays completely separated from the current social and economic order.
Rating: 4 stars
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