Doerr's new book, however, is less concerned with the importance of memory in bestowing meaning than in the impermanence of the meaning it bestows. For Doerr's characters, reality is ultimately little more than a projection, or a collection of projections, out of which they create the illusory textures of their lives.
In that sense, Memory Wall is less a loose collection than a suite of six related stories, connected not by character but by theme. Memory, whether cultural or biological or personal, is a driving force throughout the book.
In "Village 113," a Chinese woman, keeper of the seeds for her river village, faces a future in which everything she has ever known, her own history as well as that passed down over the generations, will be obliterated when a new dam is built and the waters rise to drown her home. For half a millennium, memory has been as constant as the two stone lions in the Park of Heroes, "their backs polished from five centuries of child-riders," but beneath the water, this history will disappear as if it had never been there.
"Procreate, Generate" addresses the generational question through a different filter, tracing a Wyoming couple's increasingly desperate efforts to have a child. The characters here are so different that they appear to occupy distinct universes, the former bound by centuries of tradition and the latter unmoored even from the limits of the body itself. And yet, they echo each other in the most nuanced of ways.
"Embryo, seed coat, endosperm: what is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?" thinks the seed keeper, pondering her place in the universe, which has been rendered obsolete in an instant, the instant in which the water began to flow.
