Aminatta Forna (Author)
2011 Orange Prize for fiction Shortlist
2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize
Paperback: 464 pages Publisher: Grove Press; 1 edition Language: English
ISBN-10: 080214568X ISBN-13: 978-0802145680
"A subtle and complex exploration of both the psyche of a war-torn African state and the attractions which it holds for an outsider. Forna is a writer of great talent and courage, one who never shies away from asking the difficult question."-Monica Ali
“Delivering us to a common center, no matter where we happen to be have been born, Aminatta Forna tackles those great human experiences of love and war, of friendship, rivalry, of death and triumphant survival. Often darkly funny, written with gritty realism and tenderness, The Memory of Love is a profoundly affecting work.”—Kiran Desai
Book Description
Since its publication in hardcover, Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love has been hailed as a book of rare beauty and importance, and has been shortlisted for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and selected for the January 2011 Indie Next List. With astounding depth and elegance, it takes the reader through the haunting atmosphere of a country at war, delicately intertwining the powerful stories of two generations.
In contemporary Freetown, a devastating civil war has left an entire populace with secrets to keep. In the capital hospital Kai, a gifted young surgeon is plagued by demons that are beginning to threaten his livelihood. Elsewhere in the hospital lies Elias Cole, a man who has stories to tell from the country’s turbulent postcolonial years that are far from heroic. As past and present intersect, Kai and Elias are drawn unwittingly closer by Adrian, a British psychiatrist with good intentions, and into the path of one woman at the center of their stories.
A work of breathtaking writing and rare wisdom, The Memory of Love seamlessly weaves together the lives of these three men to create a story of loss, absolution, and the indelible effects of the past—and the very nature of love.
From Publishers Weekly
Forma, recipient of a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Ancestor Stones, returns to Africa's troubled conscience in this admirable if uneven outing. Adrian Lockheart is a well-meaning English psychologist who embarks on a temporary post at a Sierra Leone hospital intending to modernize treatment of the long-neglected schizophrenics, transients, and scarred victims of civil war who walk the hospital grounds. He soon meets his match in the elderly ex-professor Elias Cole, who speaks eloquently of his country's turbulent history--and also of his passion for the wife of a more radically minded colleague whose eventual disappearance Cole may be implicated in. As the holes in Elias's story widen, Adrian falls for a patient's daughter and into conflict with a surgeon, and ripples from the unexamined past threaten the present. Yet Forma's material doesn't measure up to the book's length. The book's prolixity, combined with scenes that drag or come off as forced, certainly doesn't ruin the experience, but it does occasionally glut what amounts to a heartening cry for moral responsibility in the thick of maddening injustice.
From Booklist
Set in Sierra Leone at the turn of the twenty-first century, Forna’s absorbing second novel (after Ancestor Stones, 2006) revolves around three very different men. British psychiatrist Adrian Lockheart has fled his failing marriage in England in the hopes of doing some good in Sierra Leone. Adrian becomes fascinated by two of his patients, elderly Elias Cole, a former university professor, and Agnes, a woman lost in a fugue state. The dying Cole reveals to Adrian, Scheherazade-like, how he fell in love with a radical colleague’s wife in the late 1960s, while Adrian must piece together the details of Agnes’ life. Adrian finds a friend in a haunted young surgeon, Kai, who is contemplating leaving the country. Kai questions some of Adrian’s risky decisions, such as his intention to track Agnes down once she leaves the hospital, but it is Adrian’s involvement with a local woman from Kai’s past that shocks the young doctor. Fate and tragedy intertwine in this stunning and powerful portrait of a country in the aftermath of a decade of civil war.
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Praises
“Forna has achieved something…startling and impressive here. Here is a luminous tale of passion and betrayal….Forna’s sharp eye spares no one its brutal honesty…. And she writes to expose what remains after all the noise has faded: at the core of this novel is the brave and beating heart, at once vulnerable and determined, unwilling to let go of all it has ever loved.”— New York Times Book Review
“[An] elegantly rendered novel of loss and rehabilitation in the aftermath of Sierra Leone's long civil war….As Kai, Adrian and Elias are revealed in flashbacks and fragments, the novel coalesces into an ambitious exploration of trauma and storytelling….Forna advances the story through tightly executed scenes…time bombs that detonate once their context becomes clear.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“The real pleasure of Forna’s storytelling is in her scrutiny of her characters’ inner lives and her ability to connect their choices to the moral dilemmas of a traumatized society.”—The New Yorker
"She threads her stories like music, imperceptibly into the reader's consciousness. One is left hauntingly familiar with the distant and alien; not quite able to distinguish the emotional spirits of fiction from the scars of real experience." —The Times (London)
"Forna weaves an intricate tapestry of betrayal, tragedy and loss; expertly drawing together the threads that link the sick old man, the brilliant doctor with dreams of leaving his troubled homeland, the wounded English psychologist and the young woman who links the three of them in a common bond of love… [Forna] moves deftly between the enchantments of different narratives: the therapeutic, the confessional, the traumatic—flashbacks, nightmares, hauntings, fugue states where stories are lost or distorted beyond recognition and the sweetly joyous themes of new love, renewal, springing hope, second chances." — The Telegraph, April 2010 (UK)
“Aminatta Forna’s brilliant new novel takes an oblique look at the Sierra Leonean civil war of the 1990s. . . Forna writes like a scientist, not only in the accuracy of her descriptions but in the way she selects which incidents to highlight, turning each scene into a metaphor that reverberates with meaning beyond the event itself…you feel that what she is reaching for is economy of phrasing, aptness of imagery, exactness of description, and she achieves that perfectly. This is a remarkable novel: well researched, well thought out, well written – the kind that deserves to be on the Booker shortlist.”—Helon Habila, The Guardian (UK)
"Aminatta Forna's two previous books explored, with elegance and empathy, the conflicts endemic to Sierra Leone. Her second novel continues Forna's examination of unpalatable truths while sacrificing none of her talent as a storyteller." — The Sunday Telegraph (UK)
"Through the complicated connections between characters, Forna explores a country’s history: the violence and chaos of war, the scars, the hope and determination and the uncertainty of rebuilding." — The Sunday Times (UK)
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Reader's Review
I took my lead from The New York Times' top rated review of The Memory of Love and was not disappointed. The narrative takes place either side of the civil war in Sierra Leone. Elias, an elderly university professor tells his story to Adrian Lockheart, a British psychologist. Meanwhile Adrian becomes friends with a young Sierra Leonian surgeon Kai Mansaray. The book encompasses a multitude of themes. How do people live and love in war? Where is the line between inaction and complicity? Can you really ever heal trauma, or do people simply learn to live with what has happened? The story unwinds slowly and richly. Cole's voice is one of wrecked grandeur as he tells his story to Adrian. But can he be trusted? Is he telling the whole truth, or as his daughter says: 'There are things about him you don't know.' Gradually the story gathers page turning pace. This is not an easy novel, the author doesn't spoon feed the reader, but forces them to think. I found the characters and themes lingered long after I finished reading. Brilliant!
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