Memory of Love (Olsson) - Discussion Questions

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.)

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