Oh, how the stories of a place are captured or distorted over the years: is the house doomed, or does it doom? Makkai's book meditates on identity, belonging and isolation, and the tide of a century. "We aren't haunted by the dead," she writes, "but by the impossible reach of history. By how unknowable these others are to us, how unfathomable we'd be to them."
unknowable and unfathomable