Those who have known me for a long time, who have really gotten to know me, know that I have a deep-seated love of story. Not a preference for fiction or nonfiction, not a preference for the medium that it exists in, but for the way that it progresses, the way that the viewpoint on display interacts with the events being discussed to create a unique narrative. The best authors, in my opinion, are the ones who can tap into that aspect of story, who can display an understanding of how to craft a viewpoint as well as a narrative sequence.
At its core, this novel is about storytelling. Jumping back and forth between events in the 1930s and 2005, the core narrative deals with the titular "lost book". Adana Moreau, a character whose literal presence ends less than a fifth of the way through the book, is a Dominican refugee living in New Orleans after escaping the conflict that took her parents during the United States occupation of the Dominican Republic. While she speaks no English when she reaches Louisiana, with the help of her husband (a literal pirate whose name is never given), her son Maxwell (an avid reader with a severe case of wanderlust), and a librarian, she is able to teach herself the language, becoming quite fond of the early science fiction that would have been available at the time (specific examples include Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and some of the works of H.P. Lovecraft).
After finding a newspaper article about Percy Fawcett, who disappeared while searching for an ancient lost city that he believed to exist in the Brazilian rainforest, Adana gets the idea to write her own science fiction novel, Lost City, which is described and summarized as being an early example of post-apocalyptic fiction, influenced in large part by her own life story and what she had read of Fawcett's story, dealing with the search for lost cities and eventually with parallel universes. She is tapped to write a sequel, A Model Earth, but after completing it, she becomes ill, and decides to destroy the manuscript before it's published. Her son has read the unpublished novel, though, so it lives on through him.
After Adana's story ends, the narrative jumps forward to late 2004, and the viewpoint changes to Saul Drower, an Israeli living in Chicago who cares for his grandfather, and who immigrated to the United States in his childhood after his parents were killed by Fatah militants in the Coastal Road massacre. After his grandfather's death, he is given a package that he's instructed to send to Maxwell Moreau, a theoretical physicist specializing in the theory of parallel universes at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago. However, Moreau has retired, left Santiago, and did not leave a forwarding address, so the box is returned. Opening it to see what the heavy package was, Saul finds a 926-page manuscript for A Model Earth by Adana Moreau.
Enlisting the help of his lifelong friend Javier Silva, a journalist who has been reporting on protests and human rights issues in South America and Mexico but returned for a new job at the Chicago Tribune, Saul is able, after a number of months, to track down Maxwell's new address in New Orleans. Packages to New Orleans are not being shipped, due to events in August 2005, decides that he needs to hand-deliver it.
From there, the book shifts back and forth between the stories of Saul and Javier's search through the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina for Maxwell, and Maxwell's childhood experiences growing up in New Orleans and Chicago. At the same time, the underlying story of where Saul's manuscript came from is slowly revealed, only becoming totally clear when everything finally comes together at the end.
If the book was just about these characters, it would be interesting enough... but there's more to it. Saul's grandfather was a historian who showed a particular ability to get people he interviewed to open up and tell their stories, always nudging them on with a "Tell me more" sort of prompt. Throughout the novel, there are brief interludes, always several pages long, where a character tells a story about their history, about how they came to be where they are, about who and where they have lost and how they have coped with those losses. These stories range from a man who was a translator for the Bolsheviks in 1910s Petrograd fleeing to America, to a Sicilian WWII soldier's long-buried wartime memories, to a Chilean widow in the early 2000s searching for evidence of the fates of her family members who were "disappeared" by the Pinochet regime.
The theory of parallel universes appears commonly as well, with Saul in particular thinking about all the worlds where things happened differently, where he was with his parents when they were killed, or where they had taken a different bus and he grew up in Israel, or where Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla suffered a brain injury as a child and never rose to power... all the possibilities that can be explored but which we can never know the full ramifications of, as they didn't happen in our universe, our timeline.
That, then, becomes the true message of the book: we can't know or experience how things might have gone differently, but dwelling on that makes loss meaningless. We can move forward after a loss, though. We can learn from the past, and remember our losses, but we can also make new lives, and make the most of what we still have, even in the face of the unimaginable. Just as New Orleans, in the fifteen years since the hurricane, has bounced back from that destruction and reclaimed its heritage as the thriving cultural center it was, we as people can do the same.
A very strong work to come out in the Year of Covid, to say the least. The entire world is being reshaped by loss on a scale unseen in most lifetimes, whether or not people want to admit that it's real. This has been the year that showed what damage ignoring an impending disaster, an ongoing disaster, can wreak; the way we move forward from that is to learn from the experience, to let it shape but not stop culture, and to remember.
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