Memoranda

Rating:
Summary: A Journey in the Mind's Eye
Review: A rich and haunting tale--by turns horrifying,heartbreaking and hilarious, but always surprising. Ford is an eloquent tour guide of inner worlds; his vivid characters, thrilling journeys and impossible landscapes engage us with the startling elusive logic of dreams. A worthy successor to the excellent THE PHYSIOGNOMY, MEMORANDA stands on its own as a beautiful meditation on memory--that most familiar and mysterious inner world. Bravo!

Rating:
Summary: Overcooked Navel-gazing
Review: I am rarely effusive, but it is difficult to praise this book too much. Everything about the writing, from its style to its visual imagery, is superb. Together with its predecessor it represents a remarkable tour de force and it leaves the reader wishing for more. This is the sort of book you pick up and four hours later you look up at the clock and realize that by golly you're going to go ahead and finish it in this one sitting.

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating continuation of "The Physiognomy"
Review: I found Ford's "The Physiognomy" to be dark, but utterly fascinating. This sequel continues the very strange tale of the main character Cley as he tries to make amends for his grotesque previous life and tries to understand life itself.

He has established himself in the remote settlement of Wenau as a healer, and feels that he is finally on a good path when his evil master Drachton Below attempts to destroy Cley and the town by infecting it with a deadly sleeping sickness.

Trying to return to Below to extract the cure from him, Cley learns that Below is himself infected with the same sickness and is slowly dying. The only way left to find the cure is to make a perilous journey directly into the mind of Below where he will hopefully discover the answer before Below dies taking Cley with him.

As with "The Physiognomy", the writing is gripping and extraordinary. The concepts are totally new to me and add fascinating possibilities to the ongoing question of how reality may be truly perceived.

Fascinating characters clearly wrought, and an astounding plot expertly presented in stunning language leave me, as before, with an intense desire for MORE!

If you enjoyed "The Physigiognomy", this sequel is a must. I strongly recommend reading them in order as "Memoranda" relies heavily on the history of the previous tale.

Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating continuation of "The Physiognomy"
Review: I found Ford's "The Physiognomy" to be dark, but utterly fascinating. This sequel continues the very strange tale of the main character Cley as he tries to make amends for his grotesque previous life and tries to understand life itself.

He has established himself in the remote settlement of Wenau as a healer, and feels that he is finally on a good path when his evil master Drachton Below attempts to destroy Cley and the town by infecting it with a deadly sleeping sickness.

Trying to return to Below to extract the cure from him, Cley learns that Below is himself infected with the same sickness and is slowly dying. The only way left to find the cure is to make a perilous journey directly into the mind of Below where he will hopefully discover the answer before Below dies taking Cley with him.

As with "The Physiognomy", the writing is gripping and extraordinary. The concepts are totally new to me and add fascinating possibilities to the ongoing question of how reality may be truly perceived.

Fascinating characters clearly wrought, and an astounding plot expertly presented in stunning language leave me, as before, with an intense desire for MORE!

If you enjoyed "The Physigiognomy", this sequel is a must. I strongly recommend reading them in order as "Memoranda" relies heavily on the history of the previous tale.

Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Magical SurRealism
Review: Jeffrey Ford is one of the few writers in fantasy-scifi who writes about ideas instead of events. If you like the pity and catharsis of authors like Hawthorne and Melville, the decadent symbolism of Poe, or the logical precision and impassive sadness of Kafka, then I highly recommend Ford as he is their contemporary successor. Those who criticize the plot and characterizations of The Physiognomy and Memoranda do so from misapprehensions regarding the appropriate style and substance of the allegorical genre of fiction which is not to be evaluated by the same criteria as the psychological realist school. Not because it is inferior, but because it is alien and has different goals.

Rating:
Summary: Magical SurRealism
Review: Jeffrey Ford is one of the few writers in fantasy-scifi who writes about ideas instead of events. If you like the pity and catharsis of authors like Hawthorne and Melville, the decadent symbolism of Poe, or the logical precision and impassive sadness of Kafka, then I highly recommend Ford as he is their contemporary successor. Those who criticize the plot and characterizations of The Physiognomy and Memoranda do so from misapprehensions regarding the appropriate style and substance of the allegorical genre of fiction which is not to be evaluated by the same criteria as the psychological realist school. Not because it is inferior, but because it is alien and has different goals.

Rating:
Summary: Striking, original, beautiful fantasy about memory
Review: Jeffrey Ford's previous novel, The Physiognomy, won the 1998 World Fantasy Award. If The Physiognomy is as good as its successor, it's easy to see why it won that award. Memoranda is an extremely impressive novel, at times reminding me of Borges, at other times of John Crowley, and throughout striking and original. The bulk of the novel takes places in the strange memory palace, or memory island, that the villain Drachton Below has constructed. Unlike conventional memory palaces, Below has populated his island with his memories of real people, who have some form of independent life, and who conduct experiments. Thus, in a sense, the memory island is actually thinking for Below. The hero, the former Physiognomist Cley, makes a strange journey into Below's mind, and his memory palace, meeting the four people with whom Below has poulated his memory, and falling in love with the one remembered woman, Anotine. But the memory island is falling apart as disease ravages Below's mind, and Cley must enlist the help of the "residents" to try to save Below, and his memory, long enough at least to find the antidote to the disease.

This whole landscape is original, and odd, and often beautiful. The form and setting of the novel provoke thought about the nature of memory. Ford also considers the nature of love, and addiction, and how a wholly evil man can still engender good. The plot is interesting enough, and fairly well resolved, but it's a minor source of pleasure. The prose is very fine, with many excellent images. I found the names of drinks and drugs especially memorable: shudder, sheer beauty, Rose's Old Sweet, Tears in The River, and more. Some of the horrific images, such as the Delicate and the Fetch, creatures Below uses to control his memories, are also very memorable. The characters are nicely realized and affecting, particularly the lost demon Misrix.

Even though this is the middle book of a trilogy, it has a self-contained story that is finished in this volume. That said, you will want to read The Physiognomy once you've read this book, and so it would probably be best to read it first, in the order published. And while the central story of this book is concluded, Cley's life story is definitely left hanging at the end, and I for one eagerly anticipate the third volume, The Beyond.

Rating:
Summary: Striking, original, beautiful fantasy about memory
Review: Jeffrey Ford's previous novel, The Physiognomy, won the 1998 World Fantasy Award. If The Physiognomy is as good as its successor, it's easy to see why it won that award. Memoranda is an extremely impressive novel, at times reminding me of Borges, at other times of John Crowley, and throughout striking and original. The bulk of the novel takes places in the strange memory palace, or memory island, that the villain Drachton Below has constructed. Unlike conventional memory palaces, Below has populated his island with his memories of real people, who have some form of independent life, and who conduct experiments. Thus, in a sense, the memory island is actually thinking for Below. The hero, the former Physiognomist Cley, makes a strange journey into Below's mind, and his memory palace, meeting the four people with whom Below has poulated his memory, and falling in love with the one remembered woman, Anotine. But the memory island is falling apart as disease ravages Below's mind, and Cley must enlist the help of the "residents" to try to save Below, and his memory, long enough at least to find the antidote to the disease.

This whole landscape is original, and odd, and often beautiful. The form and setting of the novel provoke thought about the nature of memory. Ford also considers the nature of love, and addiction, and how a wholly evil man can still engender good. The plot is interesting enough, and fairly well resolved, but it's a minor source of pleasure. The prose is very fine, with many excellent images. I found the names of drinks and drugs especially memorable: shudder, sheer beauty, Rose's Old Sweet, Tears in The River, and more. Some of the horrific images, such as the Delicate and the Fetch, creatures Below uses to control his memories, are also very memorable. The characters are nicely realized and affecting, particularly the lost demon Misrix.

Even though this is the middle book of a trilogy, it has a self-contained story that is finished in this volume. That said, you will want to read The Physiognomy once you've read this book, and so it would probably be best to read it first, in the order published. And while the central story of this book is concluded, Cley's life story is definitely left hanging at the end, and I for one eagerly anticipate the third volume, The Beyond.

Rating:
Summary: Insubstantial.
Review: Wenau, the edenic commune formed by the former citizens of the Well-Built City, has once again fallen under Below's curse. Now it is up to a reformed Cley, who is now a herbalist, to journey into the werewolf-infested ruins in search of the antidote, only to discover that Below himself has succumbed to his engineered plague, and the only antidote is concealed inside Below's mind.

"Memoranda", the second in the Cley trilogy, suffers from a tone of absurd pomp, as the previous one suffered from its lugubrious arrogance. The plot is unsatisfying, because there are no undertones, no backstory or foreshadowing, no emotional significance. The narration suffers from sudden bouts of pointless immaturity, instantly preventing any and all suspension of disbelief (like Quismal, the horse that frothes at both ends). The characters are meaningless to the reader, because they are extremely flat, and, in any case, Ford presents them as mere figments of Below's imgination. Ford has perfected the fleeting, episodic feeling of dreams, but it is time to move on, or at least expand the topic. Why use such sophisticated language if it goes to waste? Ford states facts and events, without involving the reader, who ends up being a disinterested, neutral presence: the island is flating in the air ("Is that so?"); the Delicate eats people ("Oh, is that what it does?").

Many readers (myself among them) feel compelled to see this series to the end, but reading "Memoranda" is like reading a napkin.