All I Want for Christmas ... from Memento Nora

Ok. We’re supposed to talk about what cool thing or idea from our own book that we’d like for Christmas.

I’m a little stumped.  I don’t know that I’d actually want the glossy things from Memento Nora.

For instance, there’s the little TFC (Therapeutic Forgetting Clinic) shop on every corner that dispenses Amelioral, the forgetting pill. You tell the man (or woman) in the white coat your darkest memory, pop a pill, and go on like nothing ever happened. You even earn Frequent Forgetting points every time you go.

Granted, this would be outstanding for true sufferers of Post Traumatic Distress Syndrome.  I even based the pill (and how it works) on current research in PTSD.  So, if you do have PTSD, that’s my Christmas wish for you: to be able to forget and get on with your life. 

For me, though, not so much.

I’d probably like to have Winter’s Garden in my backyard. Fourteen-year-old Winter Nomura builds a Rube Goldberg-ish kinetic sculpture garden behind her grandfather’s converted warehouse home.  It’s how she deals. She throws her considerable energy and talent into transforming junk in something weirdly marvelous.

Here’s Nora’s description of one of the pieces, the Shopping Bag Crab:

“Watch this,” Micah whispered, pointing to the next thing in the garden. It looked like a metal shopping bag lying on its side.

The water started to lap up onto the sand by the bag. Two slender black pieces of metal peeked out of the bag and felt their way to the ground. The feelers or legs crab walked themselves partially out of the bag, and the creature started to pull itself, bag and all, up the sloped walk. Its frenzied back-and-forth motion reminded me of something.

“Are those windshield wipers?” I asked, thoroughly impressed—and unnerved.

He nodded, a big grin on his face.

Something about the jerky, almost desperate crawl of the wipers dragging the shopping bag shell behind them made me uneasy. Then as the whole thing reached the top of its little hill, it stopped crawling, collapsed back into its shell, and slid back down to where it had started. It was like it couldn’t get anywhere with that bag on its back. 

I don’t have drawings (that look good, that is) of all of the pieces, but here are a couple of the inspirations for her sculptures.

This is Tinguely Fountain in Basel, Switzerland. The artist, Jean Tinguely, created this series of sculptures in 1971.



And, yes, this is a Honda Accord ad. For it, Honda put together a Rube Goldberg assembly of parts working together to start the car. (The windshield wiper part inspired the Shopping Bag Crab.)



The dog might not agree, but I think a kinetic sculpture garden would look great on my patio. Now I just need someone with the talent and energy to build it. (And that ain't me.)

Cool art work aside, my question for you guys is would you take a forgetting pill that only erased selective memories? Or, if that's too deep for the holidays, what kind of secret garden would you create if you could build or grow anything?

Angie Smibert
Memento Nora
Marshall Cavendish, April 2011

 

You can find me at:

Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads | Class of 2K11