Memoranda

Jeffrey Ford is a highly unique novelist with ideas that stretch fantasy into the realms of psychological exploration. This novel builds upon its predecessor, "The Physiognomy," but also works pretty well as a stand-alone story thanks to Ford's skill in weaving flashbacks into the narrative. Building on the strange meta-science of mnemonics, the story here takes place in an evil villain's memories and their wavering connections to reality, with stability and realism created by the man's subconscious even as the dream world disintegrates in frightful ways with the onset of mental incapacity. Ford's settings and dreamscapes are disarmingly surreal and haunting, giving the book a very Kafka-esque vibe of fear and melancholy, but somehow love and hope survive the inner-space horrors. The reader might have trouble getting through some awkward action sequences and dialogue, and the intertwined plot elements can get confusing, but Ford brings everything back together impressively and flawlessly. Readers looking for standard fantasy quests and dramatic action might be bored or befuddled by this book, but those who appreciate the depths of psychological exploration and the darkness of inner space will be amazed by the unique powers of Jeffrey Ford's imagination. [~doomsdayer520~]

Book Two in the Well-Built City trilogy, wherein Cley, the "hero" of The Physiognomy, struggles to find meaning and redemption in a new life as a healer. This struggle ultimately launches him back into the Well-Built City and into the surreal memory palace of a madman, led on by a tamed demon, to find the cure for a terrible plague. A vivid and bizarrely imagined book, but full of feeling and the struggle to define the nature of love, humanity, sacrifice and redemption.

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.

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.

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!