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I more or less grew up on the story of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. I was introduced to their presence in high school, have seen them circle in the plaza well into the 2010s, and continue to find them brought up.

Han Kang's latest novel is a quiet, snow-muted vision of what hiding these pasts and successfully demolishing remembrance looks like. Framed by the idea of a pair of reattached fingers which must be made to bleed every three minutes in order to ensure healing, Kang sends protagonist Khungha to visit her friend's home during a blizzard that leaves her apart from the outside world in a way to force her to reckon with this small space and its meaning to a larger loss across the island.

I haven't read Human Acts yet, which I know this was designed to pair with. I would imagine reading this in conjunction with a series of books on the American Century, such as The Jakarta Method, Prisión verde, The Kiss of the Spider Woman, and Ainda Estou Aqui.

Between the New Yorker's books newsletter and Dan McClellan, this book came into my radar a couple times recently. As a recovering Evangelical that grew up during the Left Behind mania, I was excited for going much deeper than what was cited in a brief comment on how the book ended up in the canon.

There's a final chapter discussing specifically the so-called Gnostic Gospel discovery at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, and how a particularly annoying bishop worked to bring the previously independent monastic orders under Rome's hierarchy that is revealing. That and the first chapter, which situates John of Patmos in regional history and Judean politics is probably the most illuminating.

It's short. But there are two chapters that, if you grew up in the 90s and 2000s in the Evangelical sphere, did not feel all that exciting. If you didn't, by all means, feel free to enjoy this as a whole.

The final page and a half deserves to be read to the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme, but it's a good novel to question what it means to be incomplete to a partner while still being sought out. And it's amusingly full on one-liners.

The one my book club is slowly finding as they get through is "All of human existence is nothing but a dream our genitals are dreaming. We're just here to act it out." Banger. Dumb as hell. Perfect.

Quite honestly I was expecting the finale to be something along the lines of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery or something, and it really looks like everyone sitting in one confessional.

Church people are shitty. There's not much more going on in it. Not a gripping read but it wasn't awful.

I'll be honest that I did nearly put this down after the first third, which I found to be a slog. Yes, we're getting the setting. Yes, we're being introduced to the three major plots. But Jesus Christ, we're working between too many different threads to be able to call the beginning a pleasant reading experience.

That said, once it clears up and we get out of the convent and start to vaguely understand the prison in our present timeline, the book really does start to run fast enough to keep the reader engaged. By the end, the ability to luridly account absolute monsters engaged in absurd acts in contradiction of the policies they are required to commit is the fun turned-on-head sort of situation that I was expecting in the beginning.

Cabezón Cámera does indicate in the acknowledgements that she's working substantially with the text of the Guaraní creation epic Ayvu Rapyta. I read this book in English translation, but Ayvu Rapyta is not fully available in my native language. The University of São Paulo does have a PDF of the Spanish language translation that was first produced in the 1950s by a folklorist, available at this URL: obrasraras.usp.br/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/8803/ANTROPOLOGIA_N-5_1959.pdf?sequence=1