Memory what?

In Memory Wall, Anthony Doerr's new collection of short stories, memory is a collage of sticky notes, a consolation, a treasure map or torture chamber, even a commodity. In the title story, memories are mined from failing minds and sold to provide solace to the despairing, while in the stunningly beautiful "Village 113," memories are submerged like seeds beneath the floods of change.

In these stories, a woman tries to preserve the memory of her village while another tries to forget the pain of the Holocaust; a couple struggles to remember their passion and a child tries to forget her pain by fishing in forgotten rivers.

The one false note in this collection arises in "The River Nemunas," in which the first-person narrator claims to be fifteen years old but speaks and thinks like a much younger child. The child characters in "Afterworld" are more believable, even those who are never allowed to grow up. Esther's seizures send her on silent nightmare journeys: "Soot rains from the sky. Every doorway she passes is crammed with dirty, silent people. They sip gray broth or squat on their heels or study the lines of their hands. Crows flap from gutters. Leaves fly along the streets and die and rise into the air once more."

It's astonishing that a story so suffused with suffering and death should rise in the end toward joy: "Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade."

Something similar happens in the title story, "Memory Wall," in which a woman's bitter memories of her marriage propel a teen to scatter memories like breadcrumbs while seeking to recover a forgotten fossil. Uncovering the past requires skill, patience, fortitude, and a little luck, but the result brings hope.

"Memory Wall" also features a sci-fi gadget that harvests memories from the elderly and records them on disks that can be bought, sold, and traded, allowing others to enter into a stranger's remembered experiences. Doerr's collection of stories functions in much the same way, inviting readers into the richly realized lives of strangers. These memories, though, won't disappear as long as there are readers to open the book.