ANTONIA PONT The Memory Library. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Memories are not merely recounted in Antonia Pont’s novella.

How would you like to share someone else’s memories? No, not to just listen to them or read them, but to experience them, to be where they were, do what they were doing, hear what they heard (voices, birds, etc.), and feel the emotions they felt.

‘You could join up!’ the proprietor of the Memory Library, Charlie, tells Hiru, who has ducked into this ‘shop’ just to get out of the cold wind.

… it’s very low cost, relatively, but we do ask for a phone number and a few personal details. They are stored in my abysmal handwriting, so that’s practically a guarantee of privacy.

Hiru is taken aback by the ‘substantial leaf of plastic money’ Charlie requires as a deposit on the equipment, but he has told her to set it up when she’s feeling either ‘strained and preoccupied’ or ‘floaty and lateral’.

Hiru, who has been living through the ‘wrung-out weeks of an ending’, decides that she has spent most of these weeks in the former state and has been ‘craving something of the latter’:

Maybe [she thinks] if I put the ‘strained’ to use intentionally, via the dubious equipment, it might give way to the ‘floaty and lateral’? This prospect unleashed a swoon of solace, enough to allay my doubt regarding the kit’s ability to extract, or document, anything that might be going on in my head.

The equipment looks like an old ‘discman’ and has a number of thin cables with sticky buds on the ends to attach to various parts of the body. It has no play button, but Charlie has told her, ‘The equipment knows when to start.’

The old town where Hiru is living is beset by salt-storms that coat the buildings and make them look like ‘ornate confectionaries’. And the Memory Library, as Hiru observes, is not one of

… those oddities from the previous century: aisles of paper books; reading tables; a certain kind of light and visitor. This one was full of cramped shelves that reached from floor to ceiling and was steeped in a dim luminescence as if something complicated and private went on there.

Nor is Charlie an old-style librarian. From Hiru’s descriptions, and those of Monin, a long-time user of the library, he seems eccentric and curiously detached; a mentor who, as he gets to know your taste, may exchange ‘banter about what’s on offer’ but ‘never recommends, only informs’; or warns about responsible usage.

He angers Monin, who has begun to visit the Library daily in her lunch-hour, by telling her one day that ‘Remembering is no replacement for the world,’ and sending her away.

Monin is clearly disenchanted with the real world. ‘The present went out of fashion a long time ago’, she imagines telling him:

The present is like a hole that you dig in dry sand. It’s mildly thankless, and best left to the young or mentally undercooked.

Monin, like Hiru, distances herself from others, and she has begun to find the memories she borrows ‘temptingly meaningful’ as she browses whole unfamiliar ‘spectrums of feeling’.

So, what does it feel like to be immersed in someone else’s memories?

Hiru describes part of one experience:

The gaze pans up into the tree’s vast dome. It is all russet and fluttering yellow. Each time the head moves, there’s the tickle of a rough, real scarf. Down below, a wide black surface waits, an expanse of mesh. The hands let go and the body falls – sailingly. There’s a jelly landing on the trampoline then gleeful rebound. Queasy exhilaration of descent and flying, of soaring and landing, in booming arcs.

In order to borrow memories, members must contribute some of their own to add to Charlie’s stock. Hiru makes her first contribution, remembering a day baking with her Oma when she was six. ‘A pretty dull effort, sticky with sentiment’, but Charlie takes it and checks it, as he checks all contributions for anything that might identify the contributor, and adds it to the shelves. Occasionally he slips up, and it is one such slip that catches Monin’s attention and makes her determine to find the woman whose shadow she has seen in a window-reflection in a memory. She fails to return the loan and watches it repeatedly. So begins what she calls ‘The Search’, and it is her ‘humpbacked secret’, kept, especially, from Charlie.

Chapter by chapter we get to know Hiru and Monin better. Both are affected by the Library and both are changed by their new experiences and start to find purpose in their days. One particular borrowing makes Hiru feel alive and she returns to it again and again, worrying that it is like an addiction, a ‘cheap pleasure’ that may turn out to be ‘a costly one’, but ‘something heavy’ has left her and she leaves the house for the first time for ages.

Monin’s search and Hiru’s new confidence finally produce a result and Charlie seems to have had something to do with that, although he remains enigmatic and his role is never clear.

This is a strange book. At first I was not at all sure what was going on, but I was intrigued by this ingenious idea and kept reading. Reading it a second time (it is quite short) was a delight, and with some of the mystery resolved, the characters of Hiru, with her cat, Silt, and Monin with her rages and her determination, became distinct. I was also left with the thought that AI might well produce a Memory Library like this one in the near future.

Antonia Pont The Memory Library Spineless Wonders 2024 PB 214pp $24.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

You can buy The Memory Library from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

If you’d like to help keep the Newtown Review of Books a free and independent site for book reviews, please consider making a donation. Your support is greatly appreciated.

Tags: Antonia | Pont, Australian fiction, Australian women writers, memories, speculative fiction