The Memory Artists

Praise for
The Memory Artists

Winner of the Canadian Authors Association Award

Shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize

Shortlisted for the Sunburst Award

Shortlisted for the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction

Shortlisted for the WordsWorthy Award

“Combines smartness with wisdom… Almost absurdly inventive.”

—David Mitchell, author of
Cloud Atlas
,

in
The Daily Telegraph
Books of the Year review (U.K.)

“
The Memory Artists
is wonderful. Rich and humane, a repository of culture worth remembering, and a moving elaboration on the simple truth that we should do good for others.”

—Colin McAdam, author of
Some Great Thing

“A model of inventiveness.”

—
Times Literary Supplement
(U.K.)

“All the hallmarks of [Moore’s] fiction are here. They include an ability to create engaging characters, and a fine balance of warmth, insight and eviscerating humour.”

—
The Independent
(U.K.)

“Ingenious… mesmerizing… reading it is like immersing oneself in a warm bath of words and ideas. There are many rich nuggets buried in
The Memory Artists
.”

—
The Gazette
(Montreal)

“A journey of fleeting moments and repetitive scenes, juxtaposing various shades of recollection with a dance of words…
The Memory Artists
is a marvel.”

—
Edmonton Journal

“All the ingredients of an entertaining, seductive mystery… Moore repeatedly displays his ability to draw characters through subtle gestures.”

—
Quill & Quire

“Infused with the same wit, verve and zany imagination that energises
Prisoner in a Red-Rose Chain
… The sections that deal with Stella’s Alzheimer’s are wonderfully written and genuinely moving.”

—
Literary Review of Canada

“Complex, ambitious structure… Moore should be commended for his inventiveness.”

—
The Globe and Mail
(Toronto)

“Virtuoso wit… Pythonesque (as in Monty, not lethal serpent)… crawling with tragic irony.”

—
Mirror
(Montreal)

“A hilarious yet poignant book about a young genius trying to deal with his mother’s Alzheimer’s… Entertaining and intelligent.”

—
Flare

“Ingenious… A brainy follow-up to
Red-Rose Chain
.”

—
Montreal Review of Books

“A novel that pushes at the edges of expectations… [that] dares to be different.”

—
Edmonton Journal

“The winner of the Commonwealth Prize has again proven his talent for wry commentary… Moore’s clever, complicated construction testifies to his ability and broad imagination.”

—
Winnipeg Free Press

“Dazzlingly learned… The results of Moore’s novelistic experiments are the more interesting for being unpredictable.”

—
Books in Canada

“Twisted, tragicomic and extremely entertaining…
The Memory Artists
is one of those few novels that can pack humour, pathos, satire, love, friendship, hope and cynicism all in one volume… Like
Life of Pi
,
The Memory Artists
is one of those tales too fantastic to be true, yet so convincingly told that we can almost believe it. By turns puzzling, heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, Jeffrey Moore’s witty prose will leave the reader out of breath at the end, wondering what the hell just happened.”

—
The Link
(Montreal)

“Moore’s comic genius is undisputed… The oddball relationship between the son who can’t forget and the mother who can’t remember is fraught with hope and laughter… Ribald and compelling, the humorist is always erudite and there many hilarious sequences that left me aching for more.”

—
Hour
(Montreal)

“Jeffrey Moore’s characters are brilliant and infuriating. Despicable and seductive.
The Memory Artists
is one of the few contemporary novels I plan to read again.”

—
The StarPhoenix
(Saskatoon)

“A metafictive puzzle box, a carefully structured collage of narrative voices… The novel is a delight… Challenging, often beautiful, and frequently inspired narrative play.”

—
Straight
(Vancouver)

“Genuinely moving.”

—
The Vancouver Sun

“The story is unforgettably human… [It] leaves the reader spellbound.”

—
Scotland on Sunday
(U.K.)

“It is not often that I truly cannot decide whether a tale is fact or fiction… Jeffrey Moore uses Noel’s genius and synaesthesia to offer beautiful descriptions of luridly coloured (and memory dysfunctional) characters, as well as his experience of his mother’s disease to portray the agony of watching a loved one’s inevitable decline. He also finds time to delve into the sometimes murky world of medical research and comment on the role of medicine as an interface between science and art… Wonderfully intense.”

—
The Lancet
(U.K.)

“There is a warmth and hope—even love—that infuses the relationships between the characters, all in their different ways locked in their personal prisons.”

—
Morning Star
(U.K.)

“A challenging book, bristling with scientific and literary references from Feynman to Baudelaire by way of Nietzsche and Rossetti, this will not fail to make a huge impact.”

—
The Good Book Guide
(U.K.)

PENGUIN CANADA

THE MEMORY ARTISTS

Born in Montreal,
JEFFREY MOORE
was educated at the University of Toronto and the Sorbonne. He works as a translator and lectures at the University of Montreal. He was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for his first novel,
Prisoner in a Red-Rose Chain
, which has been optioned by Valkyrie Films.

Also by Jeffrey Moore

Prisoner in a Red-Rose Chain

The Memory Artists

Jeffrey Moore

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc., 2004 Published in this edition, 2005

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright © Jeffrey Moore, 2004, 2005

Lines from “Calmly we walk through this April’s day”: Delmore Schwartz,
Selected Poems
.

Copyright © 1959 Carcanet Press Limited. Reprinted by permission.

A version of
Chapter 18
was broadcast on CBC Radio and published in
Matrix
as “Delight in Disorder.”

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last
year invested $21.7 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

Nous remercions de son soutien le Conseil des Arts du Canada, qui a investi
21,7 millions de dollars l’an dernier dans les lettres et l’édition à travers le Canada.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in Canada.

ISBN 0-14-301749-7

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data available

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Visit the author’s website at
www.jeffreymoore.org

Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at
www.penguin.ca

To the memory of my parents,

and to Marlène

The Memory Artists

May memory restore again and again

The smallest color of the smallest day:

Time is the school in which we learn,

Time is the fire in which we burn …

—Delmore Schwartz

Foreword

What follows is a true story. For over twenty years I studied a fascinating individual, a hypermnesic synaesthete referred to as “NB” in my numerous monographs and handbooks. Near the end of our relationship, in the winter/spring of 2002, NB and his mother (SB) came into contact with three participants (NXB, SD, JJY) in memory experiments I was conducting or overseeing. This contact proved serendipitous, the pharmacological equivalent of throwing five volatile compounds into a crucible and coming up with a miracle drug.