Tor the most part, Ko pulls it off ... Giselle’s section, the first, is strongest. It unfurls elegantly with a hypnotic immediacy, starting with her early teen years ... Jackie’s segment, the second, drags at the outset ... The novel’s end, a denouement that’s unexpected, if a bit scattered and overstuffed. The everything of it all diminishes what could’ve been a more pointed conclusion. But there is much to admire in Memory Piece. The originality. The vastness. The main characters’ depth and breadth.
The documenting of life becomes something precious and worth preserving ... She writes with a cool, collected intelligence and is unafraid to wrangle big ideas ... That said, I did struggle with the gear shift into the extremely bleak 2040s. It’s a stylistic jolt.
The novel serves as an archive of our past and a vision for what’s to come, hauntingly beautiful in a way that’s both nostalgic and dystopian. In essence, Memory Piece is about the power of remembering, especially when it’s painful.
There is a separateness to each of the novel’s sections that gives it a meandering and melancholy feel. This is a compelling, often chilling and beautifully observant novel about what connects us to, and disconnects us from, each other.
Astute ... For much of the narrative, the women’s individual story lines feel a bit disjointed, but Ko brings them together in a satisfying final act in the 2040s, when America is an authoritarian police state. This is a worthy follow-up to Ko’s striking debut.
Fails to whip up much narrative tension beyond the mystery created by the photographs that appear from time to time, captioned with complicated archival labels. In the end, the book’s elaborate conceptual structure dominates the characters who inhabit it. A socially conscious novel of art and ideas.
