The Memory of Love
Linda Olsson, 2011 (The Kindness of Your Nature, New Zealand)
Penguin Publishing
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143122432
Summary
From the beloved author of Astrid & Veronika, a moving tale of friendship and redemption … Olsson is doing what she does best: illuminating the terrain of friendship and examining the many forms that love can take.
Marion Flint, in her early fifties, has spent fifteen years living a quiet life on the rugged coast of New Zealand, a life that allows the door to her past to remain firmly shut.
But a chance meeting with a young boy, Ika, and her desire to help him force Marion to open the Pandora’s box of her memory. Seized by a sudden urgency to make sense of her past, she examines each image one-by-one: her grandfather, her mother, her brother, her lover.
Perhaps if she can create order from the chaos, her memories will be easier to carry. Perhaps she’ll be able to find forgiveness for the little girl that was her. For the young woman she had been. For the people she left behind.
Olsson expertly interweaves scenes from Marion’s past with her quest to save Ika from his own tragic childhood, and renders with reflective tenderness the fragility of memory and the healing power of the heart. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1948
• Where—Stockholm, Sweden
• Education—J.D., University of Stockholm; University of Wellington
• Currently—lives in Auckland, New Zealand
Linda Olsson is a Swedish-born novelist who lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Published in 2003, her first novel, Astrid and Veronika, became an international best seller and was translated into 15 languages. She writes all of her novels in both English and Swedish.
Born and raised in Stockholm, Olsson attended the University of Stockholm. After graduating with a law degree, she worked in banking and finance, eventually getting married and giving birth to three boys.
In 1986, her family left Sweden for Africa where Olsson initially intended to take up a post in Kenya. But she traveled on to Singapore, Britain, and Japan, finally settling in New Zealand with her family in 1990. She continued her studies at the University of Wellington, graduating in English and German literature.
During her time in London, Olsson signed up for a course in creative writing and was encouraged to begin writing short stories. In 2003, after arriving in New Zealand, she won a short story competition run by the Sunday Star Times. She then enrolled in a postgraduate course, "Writing the Novel," and was inspired to try her hand at long-form fiction.
Olsson's first novel was completed in 2005. Astrid and Veronika (originally titled "Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs") became a Swedish bestseller. Subsequent novels include Sonata for Miriam (2009), The Memory of Love (2011—The Kindness of Your Nature in New Zealand ), The Blackbird Sings at Dusk (2016—not available in the U.S.), and A Sister in My House (2016, 2018 in the U.S.).
Under the pen name Adam Sarafis, OLsson has also collaborated with Thomas Sainsbury on the thriller Something is Rotten (2015). (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/6/2018.)
Book Reviews
Exquisitely rendered…quietly gripping.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Haunting and beautiful, [The Memory of Love] is a reminder of the fragility of happiness and the impossibility of living without hope.
Otago Times (New Zealand)
Linda Olsson writes beautifully, capturing the fragile nature of her characters and the beauty of the rugged landscape around her with great precision and subtlety. A hugely evocative book. The story gets under your skin and will live on long after the final page has been turned.
Gisborne Herald (New Zealand)
The emotional weather of the story is changeable and dramatic, with storm clouds sometimes threatening, unpredictable tides and winds of inner conflict, and chance meetings.… It is the storytelling, of course, that is most seductive, with the right balance between the disclosure and holding back of information to keep us reading to the end—appreciating at every twist a writer delighting in her craft.
Sunday Star Times (New Zealand)
[A] tender, loving story…concerned with searching and healing.… You sense an author of real integrity.
Weekend Herald (New Zealand)
Olsson's lyrical style is perfectly suited to the reflective tenderness that characterises Marion's narrative voice.… The tragedies of the novel, combined with the powerful resonance of the windswept and lonely coast, makes [The Memory of Love] a heavily atmospheric novel of great emotional weight.
Listener (New Zealand)
Olsson successfully intertwines New Zealand and Sweden to create a beautiful and compelling story.
Mahrangimatters (New Zealand)
One of the most stirring and sensitive books I have read for a long time.… An outstanding read.
Star (New Zealand)
[A] touching, if far-fetched, tale.… The author’s prose is at times pinched and lapidary, while at others, effusive and overstated, and sometimes both.… [Yet] Olsson handles Marion and Ika’s story in a beautifully natural fashion.
Publishers Weekly
[A] deeply poetic novel...and a credit to Olsson’s narrative technique….Fans of Jennifer Haigh and Heidi W. Durrow will appreciate this darkly emotional novel.
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. What is the particular appeal of reading this kind of emotionally rich and complex novel? Does witnessing Marion’s struggle to make sense of her life help you to make sense of your own?
2. How is little Marianne affected by being taken from her grandfather to live with her mother and Hans in Stockholm? What coping strategies does she develop to manage her loneliness, fear, and confusion?
3. What is the effect of the narrative moving back and forth between Marion’s past and present? What are some of the most surprising and traumatic moments in her personal history? Why would Olsson choose to reveal these moments gradually rather than all at once?
4. Late in the novel, Marion tries to look at her relationship with Ika objectively and asks herself, “Had I used him? Was he simply a tool for me to give my soul peace? Redeem myself? Could I ever isolate my feelings for Ika from my past? See him as he was, see his true needs?” (p. 171). In what ways might Marion’s personal history have colored her relationship with Ika? Is she using him to fulfill her own needs or is she motivated more by compassion than selfishness?
5. In what ways does her relationship with Ika change Marion? Why would a mostly silent, slightly autistic nine-year-old boy lead to such major transformations in her? In what ways does he serve as a doorway into her buried past?
6. What is the significance of Marion first finding Ika lying on the beach? Does it remind her of earlier events in her life?
7. Marion, Ika, and George have all suffered major losses. Marion has lost her parents, her brother, and her grandfather, as well as her husband through divorce. Ika’s mother died soon after giving birth to him, and he never knew his father. George has lost his wife. “My home died with my wife,” he says (p. 156). In what ways might these losses have prepared them to create a new family, and a new home, with each other? Is there any way these terribly painful experiences can be seen as gifts?
8. Why does Marion feel compelled to make sense of her life, her history? Why is it so important to put the events of her life in some kind of order, to see it “as a whole”? (p. 9). How does she find that wholeness and accept her past by the end of the book?
9. Why does Olsson end the novel with George taking Marion and Ika on a helicopter flight over the project Marion and Ika have been working on? What is the significance of this heightened perspective and of Marion and Ika being able to see their project in its entirety rather than just its individual parts?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)