“Kashimada’s book blurs the national and the personal in a way that suggests the continued difficulty of working through world-historical trauma...What emerges is the narrator’s disoriented, and often disorienting, attempt to make meaning in the wake of so much ruin...Kashimada’s novel unravels like an extended exercise in what it means to attempt to describe the indescribable. Its plot tends less toward closure than relentless repetition...At times, the narrative grows vertiginously unstable, as scenes recur and flashbacks fold in on themselves. This too is partly the point. In adapting her fictional retelling of the atomic bombings from Duras’s already fictional retelling, Kashimada stages her novel as a flagrant approximation of real events.”
Read the full review in The New York Times Book Review.
