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The half-lives of history are, for Japanese novelist Erika Kobayashi, a kind of fixation.
It turned out to be uranium glass.
These stories stoke the narrators paranoia, curdling her otherwise stark narration with incessant flickers of repetition.
In Brian Bergstroms translation, the phraseunseen forcepeppers the book.
Its not me who suffers from true memory loss, reads a tweet written by the Radium Princess.
Kobayashi traces key moments in the history of radiations global development, narrative slipstreams that perennially trail the present.
That disregard for personal narratives may very well be intentional an ode to wider-reaching, conflicting histories.
Its this layering that makes Kobayashis otherwise subtle, light-footed writing intriguing.
I found myself thinking, readingTrinity, of the unnamed narrator inTom McCarthysRemainder.
Which would be fine if, by the end of the novel, we believed it too.
