I was greatly entertained by Simon Critchley’s MEMORY THEATRE, a long short story — I didn’t do a word count, it hit around 80 pages on the Kindle — about philosophy, doom and the tricks and traps of obsession. It’s hard to say too much about it without giving it all away. You’ve all learned about memory palaces from SHERLOCK, I’m sure: a classical Greek imaginal device for organising and accessing memories. Simonides was famously supposed to have devised the technique in order to identify otherwise unidentifiable corpses in a collapsed room that he himself narrowly escaped. In the instance of MEMORY THEATRE, it’s interesting that the memory palace is therefore first associated with death.

So, picture a memory palace. Imagine a physical one. Imagine it being constructed according to maps and diagrams of a person’s entire life, birth to death and everything in between. Imagine being given those maps and diagrams. Imagine finding maps and diagrams for your life within them. And you’re not yet dead.

It’s a philosophical meditation, this book, but it’s also an arrangement of memory: the maps and diagrams of a collapsing man.

MEMORY THEATRE, Simon Critchley (UK) (US)

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