Name: The Library of Traumatic Memory
Rating: 2.5 (1 reviews)
ISBN: 9781035923304

Neil Jordan

The first literary sci-fi novel from award-winning author, director and screenwriter Neil Jordan.

The Library of Traumatic Memory

The first literary science fiction novel from Neil Jordan, visionary director of The Company of Wolves and Interview with the Vampire In a windswept corner of a forgotten peninsula, love and loss echo through the halls of a mansion built on secrets. Here memory is currency of the future, and the past refuses to stay buried. In the year 2084, Christian Cartwright, a quiet librarian at the enigmatic Huxley Institute, spends his days archiving the world's most painful memories in the Library of Traumatic Memory. But when his lover Isolde dies in a mysterious car crash, Christian secretly resurrects her as a digital consciousness -- an act of grief, obsession, and defiance. As Christian navigates a world where memories can be edited, dreams harvested, and the dead made to speak, he uncovers a deeper conspiracy buried in the Institute's foundations -- one that stretches back centuries to his 18th-century ancestor Montagu Cartwright, the architect of the Huxley Mansion. Montagu's obsidian mirror and copper model may hold the key to a reality where architecture shapes fate and time loops back on itself. Blending gothic mystery, speculative science, and philosophical depth, The Library of Traumatic Memory is a haunting meditation on love, loss, and the ethics of memory. As the past and future collide, Christian must decide what it means to remember -- and what it costs to forget.

I requested an ARC of The Library of Traumatic Memory through Netgalley, after having found the name enticing and the blurb interesting enough.

The book is a weird mix of science fiction ideas, magical realist storytelling, a partially dual-timeline narrative, and reflective and sometimes quite literary prose. Reading it made me feel as if it was often on the brink of becoming an integrated piece, but never actually did rise to that quality, making for a weird uneven experience that broke the chances to flow through it.

"So, I may not be here— and it was as if her actual voice was speaking, his eardrop trembling with her specific resonance— but please, please, please don’t tell me I haven’t got feelings. In fact, by certain algorithmic criteria, feelings are all I have. They wake me on a whim. I’m at their beck and call, feelings, prodded by memory, and the memory of those feelings becomes a feeling in itself."

The Library of Traumatic Memory does have such a library, one of many technologies that are described, some more detailed and explained and others just kind of existing, but I never got to see or understand the undeniable consequences any of these had to have on the world and the people living in 2084. Some of the references to real people and the memory or legacy they would have left for that future was mostly silly. The narrative is so localized that it feels as if the world the author created is entirely made of that island and Carlsbad (Karlovy Vary in nowadays Czechia).

"A reconfiguration of the tools of the Library of Traumatic Memory to harvest whatever digital traces of the departed loved one the legislation would allow. Cloning of anything other than the smallest of pets had been outlawed since the Barron Trump multiples and the aborted nuclear strike ordered by the thirteenth Kim Il Jong, but whatever non-genomic remains the loved one had left behind– photographs, letters, diaries, all appchats and omnichannel mails and data– could still be put into play."

The secondary narrative - in the 18th century -  follows the main character's ancestor, Montagu Cartwright, and is left somewhat unexplained, between the conspiracy leading him to build something and the magic-apparent objects, which ends up feeling quite gimmicky by the end of the book. The main narrative follows the story of Christian Cartwright - who works in the Library of Traumatic Memory, in the building his ancestor had projected -, Isolde, the mysterious daughter-in-law to the man who leads the institute, and an unstable cast of connected characters, clairvoyants, and an AI called Sigmund.

Christian is an interesting man to follow and his relationship with and considerations about "Isolde" are the better part of the first half of the book.

The prose is good and easy to follow. Once the narrative stops going back in time, it also becomes more straightforward, if underexplored. The ending fell flat for me, both in how it happens and in how inconsequential a lot of things became when looking back.

I didn't dislike reading this, but I don't know if and to whom I'd really recommend reading it. 

André Nóbrega

I requested an ARC of The Library of Traumatic Memory through Netgalley, after having found the name enticing and the blurb interesting enough.

The book is a weird mix of science fiction ideas, magical realist storytelling, a partially dual-timeline narrative, and reflective and sometimes quite literary prose. Reading it made me feel as if it was often on the brink of becoming an integrated piece, but never actually did rise to that quality, making for a weird uneven experience that broke the chances to flow through it.

"So, I may not be here— and it was as if her actual voice was speaking, his eardrop trembling with her specific resonance— but please, please, please don’t tell me I haven’t got feelings. In fact, by certain algorithmic criteria, feelings are all I have. They wake me on a whim. I’m at their beck and call, feelings, prodded by memory, and the memory of those feelings becomes a feeling in itself."

The Library of Traumatic Memory does have such a library, one of many technologies that are described, some more detailed and explained and others just kind of existing, but I never got to see or understand the undeniable consequences any of these had to have on the world and the people living in 2084. Some of the references to real people and the memory or legacy they would have left for that future was mostly silly. The narrative is so localized that it feels as if the world the author created is entirely made of that island and Carlsbad (Karlovy Vary in nowadays Czechia).

"A reconfiguration of the tools of the Library of Traumatic Memory to harvest whatever digital traces of the departed loved one the legislation would allow. Cloning of anything other than the smallest of pets had been outlawed since the Barron Trump multiples and the aborted nuclear strike ordered by the thirteenth Kim Il Jong, but whatever non-genomic remains the loved one had left behind– photographs, letters, diaries, all appchats and omnichannel mails and data– could still be put into play."

The secondary narrative - in the 18th century -  follows the main character's ancestor, Montagu Cartwright, and is left somewhat unexplained, between the conspiracy leading him to build something and the magic-apparent objects, which ends up feeling quite gimmicky by the end of the book. The main narrative follows the story of Christian Cartwright - who works in the Library of Traumatic Memory, in the building his ancestor had projected -, Isolde, the mysterious daughter-in-law to the man who leads the institute, and an unstable cast of connected characters, clairvoyants, and an AI called Sigmund.

Christian is an interesting man to follow and his relationship with and considerations about "Isolde" are the better part of the first half of the book.

The prose is good and easy to follow. Once the narrative stops going back in time, it also becomes more straightforward, if underexplored. The ending fell flat for me, both in how it happens and in how inconsequential a lot of things became when looking back.

I didn't dislike reading this, but I don't know if and to whom I'd really recommend reading it. 

The Library of Traumatic Memory

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