Dreamstate fascist state.
“It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island. Things go on disappearing, one by one. It won’t be long now,” she added. “You’ll see for yourself. Something will disappear from your life.”
A Japanese island where, every now and then, something is lost. You wake up in the morning and you feel the chill that another thing has disappeared. Sometimes it takes a while to realise what it is. Perhaps it’s perfume, or emeralds. Perhaps it’s just a certain fruit, or a kind of candy. Whatever it is, it’s disappeared now, and you have to go outside and destroy all remaining units of the disappeared item. After which, you forget what it was. Everything about it is gone.
And if you dare to remember the mandated forgotten things, the Memory Police come for you, jackbooted and more brutal by the day.
It’s a fantasy dystopia, dealing almost entirely in metaphor. Don’t look for the mechanism of how the disappearances happen. It’s not there. The book is about people’s acceptance of and culpability in even the most surreal apocalyptic scenarios. This feeling is known to anyone who’s watched TRIUMPH OF THE WILL and imagined themselves into the places of people seeing giant Swastika flags unrolled to cover the entire front sides of tall office buildings. It’s not real-looking, it’s not real, and yet, here is is, the fabric of the world just changed, it’s here and persuasive and all-pervading and armed — what do you do?
This is a really miserable book. But it’s pretty:
And though I wouldn’t have been able to recount much of what R told me, it didn’t bother me in the least. Much as I had done as a girl during those secret times with my mother in the basement studio, I was content now to simply listen innocently to everything he said—like a child with the hem of her skirt spread, waiting to receive God’s chocolate from heaven.
It’s long, and it’s slow, and it’s creeping, and it’s miserable, and it has a very specific point that it works into your heart like the point of a knife.
