This is part novel, part prose poem illuminated by a series of photographs of New York buildings gradually making and unmaking themselves.
During a blistering summer heatwave, a French philosopher dies under mysterious circumstances. Soon after, a series of boxes containing his unpublished papers inexplicably arrive at the office of Simon Critchley.
As Critchley sifts through the fragments—esoteric essays, handwritten notes, and a strange trove of astrological charts—he uncovers a forgotten text on the ancient art of memory. Among the charts, he finds one predicting the deaths of several philosophers. One chart, disturbingly, is his own—mapping out his entire life and the precise details of his death.
Compelled by this eerie discovery, Critchley becomes obsessed with the manuscript and its implications. Then arrives the final box. Inside: a scale model of Giulio Camillo’s sixteenth-century Venetian memory theatre—a mystical structure said to contain all human knowledge.
And that’s when the hallucinations begin...
Blending autobiography, philosophy, occult history, and fiction, Memory Theatre is a darkly playful meditation on fate, identity, and the boundaries of reason.
‘Memory Theatre is a brilliant one-of-a-kind mind-game occupying a strange frontier between philosophy, memoir and fiction. Simon Critchley beguiles as he illuminates.’ David Mitchell, author of The Bone Clocks
‘With a sense of mischief combined with surprising reverie, Simon Critchley has braided together ideas about memory from the past with the latest thinking about unreliable narrative, altered states and the mysteries of consciousness. Memory Theatre is a tantalising, textual Moebius strip – philosophy, autobiography, and fiction twisted together.’ Marina Warner, author of Stranger Magic
Physical Info: 7.76 x 0.35 x 5.08 inches | Paperback with Flaps