The Memory of Love

Brief summary and review, no spoilers.This story takes place in the African nation of Sierra Leone and takes place over a period of time starting in the late 1960's. One of the main characters is Elias Cole, an ambitious British professor who strives to become both published and respected. He finds himself friends of sorts with a man named Julius - also a fellow professor who is both popular with his students has a beautiful wife named Saffia. Elias becomes obsessed with Saffia at first sight, and his jealousy and mixed in with some affection for Julius become a central part of the story.The other main characters in this novel are a British man named Adrian who has come to Sierra Leone to work as a psychologist in a local hospital. Adrian is married and has a child still in England, but he is obviously dissatisfied with his work there and with his marriage, and feels the need to matter and feel some passion about what he does. The other central figure in this story is a native born doctor named Kai Manseray, who is an extremely bright and dedicated surgeon. Kei and Adrian become friends, when Kei starts staying at Adrian's home on occasions to sleep and make meals.The chapters alternate and we go back and forth in time, with alternating narrators and stories. We are taken through these incredibly turbulent and disturbing years in Sierra Leone, with all its violence and horror suffered by the people due to war and government instability. In fact at one point Adrian is told that most everyone in the country has post-traumatic stress syndrome - and their mental hospitals are filled with many such damaged individuals.More than just a story about these characters, this is also a story about Sierra Leone. I did not know very much about this country, but you do learn a lot by the time you turn the last page. Many characters in this novel love their homeland, yet we see the price they pay (and paid) for staying. In this story we also meet a woman, a patient of Adrian's named Agnes, who has a strange disorder that causes her to wander in a fugue-like stake, and over time we come to know her story, and why she is the way she is.What's very good about this book is the plot itself - in the parts that take place near the most present time, Elias Cole is dying and wants to tell his story to Adrian. We get the sense he is seeking some sort of absolution, but we won't find out why till the end. We also know from that Kei is a broken man who was once passionately in love with a woman named Nenebah, though we don't know what happened to her or what caused the end of their relationship.It's just a great story, and I found it very moving with a terrific resolution and denouement.In criticism, I believe that there were parts of the novel that were over-written - and at times the constant hints and sense of foreboding overwhelms the novel. It was just too much, and if anything trying to add the drama and sense of apprehension took away from the rest of the story. I truly think this novel could've been edited down and would have made for a better story.Even with this critique, I highly recommend this book and I know it will stay with me for a long time. This is not just because of the startling depiction of the horrors experienced during wartime, but also because this author has really come up with a terrific story with memorable and true-to-life characters.

Set primarily in the late 1990s in Sierra Leone, a time in which a brutal Civil War is being waged and over fifty thousand people killed, this novel comes as a surprise. Telling two tales of love in two different generations, the author is mightily challenged to be true to her setting and time periods while also allowing the love stories to develop naturally within this fraught environment. She accomplishes this, largely, by referring to the war only obliquely for most of the novel, with flashbacks by individual speakers providing details of the war and explaining how the memories of war have affected the behavior of characters whom the reader has come to know. A flash-forward which takes place in 2003, after the end of the war, occurs at the end to reconcile elements of the plot and themes.As the novel opens, Elias Cole, a former professor and Dean of the university in Freetown, is now an elderly hospital patient, dying a slow disease which robs him of his breath. There, he is a patient of Adrian Lockheart, a British psychiatrist who has left his wife and daughter behind in England while he works for six months in the hospital near the university. Adrian quickly discovers that the dying Elias has memories that he is impelled to share about his life in the 1970s, many of these involving Saffia, the wife of Julius Kamara, a young professor. Old-fashioned story-telling conveys episodes from Elias's memories of his much younger life, and the author emphasizes from the beginning that it is with these three characters that the entire story really begins--Elias Cole, Julius Kamara, and Saffia.A parallel narrative, with different main characters, takes place sometime around 2001, near the end of the war, with flashbacks to events of the late 1990s. Kai Mansaray, a brilliant surgeon befriends Adrian Lockheart. On one trip to visit Kai's family, Adrian's life is changed dramatically when he recognizes a former patient who has left the hospital without being fully treated. The war stories which have dramatically affected this patient's life--and that of Kai's family--are revealed, along with the lives of those who have had to spend two years or more in refugee camps. The brutality of the attacking soldiers is almost beyond belief: there are no "good guys" here--the two sides are equally brutal. Still, Adrian manages to fall in love.The author's descriptions of the war are of events related to individual characters, but they are generalized in terms of the who, why, and when of warfare, and the author never really goes into the kind of detail which would distinguish this war from that of other African countries, including neighboring Liberia, under Charles Taylor. Nor does she mention the issue of Sierra Leone's "blood diamonds," which are said to have financed the rebel movement, both in Sierra Leone and in Liberia. No names of real historical characters surface here at all, and I often found myself wondering what the author's overall purpose was: A love story in the midst of war? A war story and its effects on lovers? Or a more fully developed examination of the overall power of love and its loss on a universal scale? The author seems to be aiming for all of these with the novel's length but not quite reaching her thematic goals, not quite integrating her many episodes and her large cast of characters with an over-arching structure. A strong novel in terms of emotion, this one might have benefited from editing much of the extraneous detail. Mary Whipple

I have a confession to make. I don’t read enough novels by women. I also read very little African literature. I’ve decided to remedy that this year by reading more novels by women and more novels by African writers. I had heard of Aminatta Forna before but I found this book almost by accident, on a list of African female writers. Based on this novel alone, you ought to be able to find Aminatta Forna’s name on a list of great novelists, full stop.The novel begins by following two sets of events thirty years apart. In 1969 we have Elias Cole, a junior lecturer at the university in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He has just had a paper rejected by the Dean; a serious blow because he is desperately trying to get a tenured post in his department. He befriends a popular extrovert colleague, Julius, but becomes madly jealous of him and increasingly obsessed with his beautiful wife, Saffia. At first she welcomes him as her husband’s friend but becomes uncomfortable around him when she realises he is besotted with her. Switch to 1999 where we have English clinical psychologist, Adrian Lockheart, who has left his wife and daughter to work for a few months in a hospital in Freetown. He befriends a local surgeon, Kai, but struggles to find any patients even though the whole country is suffering from terrible PTSD following a brutal civil war earlier in the 90s. One patient he does find is a dying Elias Cole, who seems to have a lot on his chest, including some dreadful terminal lung disease.In his sessions with Elias Cole Adrian pieces together a series of events that culminated in the arrest of Julius and some other academics on the night of the first moon landing in July 1969. Elias himself was arrested soon after, but whereas Julius died in custody, Elias was released and went on to have a moderately successful academic career. Why?I don’t want to give away too much about the plot. Suffice to say that Adrian’s investigations into what happened when Julius was arrested mingle with events thirty years later when he (Adrian) is allowed to work with patients at the local psychiatric hospital, patients who have been traumatised by the civil war. While Adrian gets deeper into the history and the national “mental ill-health” of Sierra Leone, Kai is desperate to get away from it. His best friend has already emigrated to the USA and Kai is planning to join him, taking his much-needed talents as a surgeon with him. When we discover what he went through in the civil war, we can hardly blame him.There is much to admire about the quality of the writing. The acknowledgements make it clear that the author has done her homework on clinical psychology and surgery, but the writing really comes alive when she moves from descriptions of bone setting to creating a complex picture of Sierra Leone and what happened to the country and its people in that period from the 60s to the 90s. One example of this is the significance of the geography of Freetown itself. Take the popular Ocean Club where Julius and Elias were celebrating the moon landing in 1969 on the night of Julius’s arrest, and where Adrian and Kai go for after work drinks thirty years later. There is a direct route from the hospital to the Ocean Club, but Kai never takes it. He tells the taxi drivers to take the long route. Why? When you find out, all the horrors of the civil war cascade down on your head.One warning. The plot does turn on some coincidences, but those coincidences are not at all improbable. Sierra Leone is a small country and the circles in which Elias Cole, Saffia and their ilk move is a lot smaller.I hope I’m not being Eurocentric when I say that I couldn’t help comparing this book to a class of Russian novels, or novels about Russia, that I very much admire. There is a theme in twentieth-century Russian literature, for obvious reasons, of betrayal, arrest, interrogation, disappearance. There is plenty of that in this book, but a lot more besides, much of it horrific, such as child soldiers drugged up and programmed as killing machines and the use of rape as a branch of military strategy. This book gives us the worst and the best of humanity: unspeakable cruelty, betrayal and deception versus imperfect people trying to do good things in the face of immense poverty and trauma.

The memory of love is beautifully written with descriptive paragraphs and the way the author discussed the narrative was really beautiful.It starts with Elias Cole discussing his life and it centres on Elias, a doctor called Adrian from the U.K. and another nurse called Kai all living in Sierra Leone.I really felt that the chapters should’ve had a heading with the name of who it was talking about; as each chapter flitted between Elias viewpoint, Adrians viewpoint or Kai’s viewpoint. It was not until I was halfway through the page that I realised who the author was referring to.I felt that the text was beautifully written, but was too long and just too drawn out. I couldn’t say it was an enjoyable read and the mental hospital scenes were long and drawn out, especially when the author discussed patients history’s and why they had been brought to the hospital in the first place.I feel that the book would’ve benefited from getting down to the plot of the story, and it would’ve been far more enjoyable; as it was too long and too drawn out.

Gosh, what a wonderful book this is. To try to précis the story has been done in some of these reviews so I will limit myself to saying the world this book brings to life, and the characters so real as I lived with them and learned about their lives will stay with me for a long time. It is sometimes a difficult and eye opening read, trawling up deep feelings, but this is a beautifully written book to take time over and savour.

This is not an easy book at first. Its plot unfolds slowly and it takes a while, I'd say more or less a couple of chapters, to get into its dynamics. But if you are patient and keep reading, you'll soon find involved by its characters and its plot.The story is set in Sierra Leone, and proceeds on two different time levels. On one hand the story of Elias, Saffia and Julius, set in 1969, the year of the man landing on the moon and of the first secret local turmoils among the people at university; on the other hand the story of Adrian and Kai set 30 years later, in 1999, after a 10-year-civil war that left unhealed wounds on the body and on the soul of thousands of devastated people. As the plot unravels, the two stories tend to converge and entwine more and more, as if all the pieces and all the characters were part of the same bigger jigsaw.I personally liked the style of Aminatta Forna, though I recognize sometimes she indulges too much in delaying useful information in order to achieve a more spectacular effect in the following pages. But apart from that, I loved the story and I loved the characters, and I think that overall she succeeded in opening a useful window on one of our recent and already forgotten tragedies.

I couldn't put this book down. Her characters have flaws but I felt for each of them. The author skillfully weaves her tale and draws you into their lives. Gradually their stories unfold and you realise how they are linked and how the war and its aftermath and the state of the country has affected them. I must admit I only had a hazy knowledge of the history of the country in which it's set, so her novel prompted me to read up about what happened there.I don't agree with some of the reviewers that the format is confusing. Yes, the author goes back and forth in time and between characters, but because they are so strongly drawn I felt as if I knew each person really well.It's not an easy or comfortable read, but it's well worth it. The details of the operations performed by Kai, the victims' accounts about the atrocities of war and the impact on their mental state are harrowing, but the story is both moving, powerful and thought provoking.I'm planning to read her other novels now.