I was captivated by Tsung-Long Wu’s brief but pervasive novel about one family navigating echoes of grief during a global catastrophe. Sarah Wu, a brilliant neurosurgeon is renowned for her research on the neurological process of how the brain constructs the present. “Each moment… is reconstructed at a delay of approximately 80 milliseconds and then presented to consciousness as if it were simultaneous…We live all of us 80 milliseconds in the past. What we call ‘now’ is a story the brain tells itself about what was just true.” (85) However, in the quiet of her own mind, the question has always surfaced: well if the mind can carry out this process of memory construction to create the present, isn’t it conceivable that it could do the opposite and leap back? This idea has always stayed submerged until the day that the earth inexplicably, itself starts doubling, pausing, and turning backwards. As people watch the laws of physics unravel around them, Sarah watches her private theory become reality. Every patient attached to an EEG monitor in the hospital not only shows a normal forward-moving brain wave, but also a second ghostly backwards one. The book then takes us on the simultaneous journey of humanity’s and Sarah‘s reckoning with a collapsing universe.

The astonishing and refreshing thing about this novel is that, in this genre, it is expected that things fall apart, that we witnessed the carnage, the baseness, as well as the ingenuity of humanity. But this book refuses to go there. This was like a soft shoe tap dance with the end of the world. Just a toe dip into the apocalypse where the author, much like someone leaning over the edge of a precipice, is at the very last minute pulled back from the brink of disaster by a t-shirt grab from behind. The machines we have come to depend on fail, supernatural phenomenon challenges our perception of “the known”, the breakdown into survival- mode occurs, and just when we’re all building up arsenals and hoarding supplies…the lights come back on. The phenomenon is understood, is reckoned with, is navigated. Tsung-Long Wu ask the question, what would it look like if it didn’t get that far? What would “we” look like if the ugliness at the end of the world began: the reckoning, the mistrust, the cleaving of what is human and what is animal, what is violent and what is not. And then, right when that process began, before we all turned into monsters, it ended and we had to face our own darkness. If we had to face what we knew was now in us, and the fear that we could return to being those selves, if something this bad ever happened again.

“… because the first thing you rebuild, after the lights, is the memory of what the dark cost… a civilization is not its machines… Civilization is the things it refused to let the dark erase” (138)

It was a clever literary tactic for the novel to follow an inverted pattern: as the world begins to grow dark, as it starts to reckon with a “natural” disintegration, the Wu family emulates a physical and supernatural reckoning. The reader doesn’t feel the heaviness that often comes with an apocalyptic-esque book because yes, you are in the darkness of the outside world but your attention is on the sanctity of the Wu family. In an isolated cabin, separated from the insanity of the world, they confront the nearly catastrophic and achieve a reckoning amidst the darkness.

I genuinely would recommend this book to almost anyone. It is binding, emergent and clings to you long after the story is over. It is an all-in-one-sitting kind of tail. Fantasy, high science fiction, medical magical realism, semi-apocalyptic, and familial at its core. The one and only thing that bothered me about the book was its tendency towards repetitive phrasing. I’m not sure if this was an editing issue or an authorship issue, but there were several places in the text were the same phrase was repeated on more than one page - ex. “ a grid to lay over a world that had stopped offering one”. There were also chapters where the author kind of got stuck on one word and used it a lot - ex. “load-bearing” in reference to emotional baggage. But these are minor, minor complaints.

Whenever a book stays with me, humming passages, revolving in my mind, it is worth both reading and spending the time to be listened to.

This is a quiet literary novel that uses the fracturing of the world to explore the ways in which grief can shape a family. It features mostly small actions with big emotional impact. The Wu family faced with impending systemic collapse retreat to a remote cabin, the coping mechanisms under which they have for years functioned are disassembled and ultimately released, there is loss and also hope. The writing is deftly handled, despite the need to lay out in explicit terms much of the emotional landscape of the characters.