The Memory Game

top tens

TEN FAVOURITE BOOKS ABOUT MEMORY

Funes the Memorious by Jorge Luis Borges. The great story of a man cursed by an inability to forget.

The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley. ‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there…’

In Memoriam by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The greatest work of poetic mourning in the language?

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. Is the meaning of life to be found not outside, but in our own memories? About ten times as long as any other novel and about a hundred times as good.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. Understanding the brain through the extraordinary ways it can go wrong – including the ‘lost mariner’, whose short-term memory has been destroyed, trapping him in an eternal, ephemeral present.

Atonement by Ian McEwan. Memory as apology, memory as fiction.

The Memory Wars by Frederick Crews. A polemic about Freud, therapy and recovered memory. Wonderful knockabout stuff, with Crews the last man standing.

The Prelude by William Wordsworth. The great epic of memory as redemption.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The great romance of memory as curse.

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov. Is memory the new religion? Read this, Proust and The Prelude, and you might start to think so.

TEN FAVOURITE FILMS ABOUT MEMORY

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). A whole town has forgotten its terrible secret, until Spencer Tracy gets off the train one day…

The Bourne Identity (2002)/The Bourne Conspiracy (2004). A man is washed up on a beach, having forgotten he is an elite secret agent. And then he starts to remember. Oliver Sacks meets James Bond.

Citizen Kane (1941). Why, at the moment of his death, did Charles Foster Kane remember his sled?

Dead of Night (1945). A terrifying film about the hazards of forgetting your dreams when you wake up.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). If you could wipe away the memory of a painful love affair, would you…?

Groundhog Day (1993). Everyone in the world has amnesia, except Bill Murray. Originally written by a Zen Buddhist, this tale was rewritten by Harold Ramis as one of the funniest films ever made. Touching too.

Memento (2000). A detective’s investigation is hampered by the fact that he has no short-term memory and must tattoo the clues on his body. And the film unfolds backwards. And it’s fantastic.

Shoah (1985). A documentary about the Holocaust with no historical footage, no photographs, no commentary, just witnesses describing what they remember.

The 39 Steps (1935). One of the most entertaining of all cinematic thrillers, in which the secret plans are stolen and learned by the music hall star, ‘Mr Memory’, in order to be smuggled abroad. Nowadays they would just email it.

Wild Strawberries (1957). A road movie in which an old man drives across Sweden to receive an honorary degree and through his own memories in search of what he has lost in his life. Ingmar Bergman’s most moving film.