The Book of Memory
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By Petina Gappah
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2 reviews
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.
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Quite a nice book but not brilliant. A lot of back story which was quite interesting and some other case histories and stories of prison life (author has a law degree), also interesting, and some Rhodesian/Zimbabwean history, ditto. All of these are difficult subjects, not least for the people living through them, yet the novel was quite an easy read. The actual story (if she didn't kill him then what did happen?) is a minimal part of the book and of course not revealed until the very end.
I thought this a fascinating insight into a a different culture. The slow reveal of what really happened to Memory for her to end up on Death Row is haunting and sad, but it is a very worthwhile read.
