Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Nov 2015
64 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
"Original, observant, and unexpectedly moving... and short enough to be absorbed in a single sitting."
A French philosopher dies during a savage summer heat wave. Boxes carrying his unpublished papers mysteriously appear in Simon Critchley's office. Rooting through them, Critchley discovers a brilliant text on the ancient art of memory and a cache of astrological charts predicting the deaths of various philosophers. Among them is a chart for Critchley himself, laying out in great detail the course of his life and eventual demise. While waiting for his friend's prediction to come through, Critchley receives the missing, final box, which contains a maquette of Giulio Camillo's sixteenth-century Venetian memory theater, a space supposed to contain the sum of all knowledge.
With nothing left to hope for, Critchley devotes himself to one final project before his death - the building of a structure to house his collective memories and document the remnants of his entire life.
"Starred Review. [O]riginal, observant, and unexpectedly moving...The novel is short enough to be absorbed in a single sitting, but the questions posed by author/character Simon regarding the full ramifications of the soul's saturation in history will linger indefinitely." - Publishers Weekly
"What begins as an eminently rational work slowly takes on a haunting illogic, a kind of intellectual horror creeping in. This strange, mesmerizing novel is hard to shake, evoking lucidity, mortality, and weirdness in equally memorable measures." - Kirkus
"Simon Critchley is a figure of quite startling brilliance, and I can never begin to guess what he'll do next, only that it is sure to sustain and nourish my appetite for his voice." - Jonathan Lethem, author of Dissident Gardens
"Memory Theater is a brilliant one-of-a-kind mind game occupying a strange frontier between philosophy, memoir, and fiction. Simon Critchley beguiles as he illuminates." - David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas
"Novella or essay, science fiction or memoir? Who cares. Chris Marker, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Frances Yates would all have been proud to have written Memory Theater." - Tom McCarthy, author of C
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. His previous books include On Humour; The Book of Dead Philosophers; How to Stop Living and Start Worrying; Impossible Objects; The Mattering of Matter (with Tom McCarthy); The Faith of the Faithless; Stay, Illusion! (with Jamieson Webster), and Bowie. He is series moderator of "The Stone," a philosophy column in the New York Times, to which he is a frequent contributor.
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