Emma Cathryne's Reviews > The Melancholy of Untold History

This novel will be great for fans of Cloud Atlas, Cloud Cuckoo Land, The Vanished Birds, and narratives that take place across similar distance & scope. The novel tells two stories in parallel: the first from the prospective of prominent historian grieving the recent death of his wife, and the second speculative history of his homeland across thousands of years and multiple generations. Woven into the tale is the tension between history and myth, as the historian works to uncover historical fabrications in one timeline as stories of gods, monsters, and cycles of reincarnation play out in the other.

This story is heavy on the metafiction, with characters behaving irreverently and offering tongue and cheek perspectives on their story in real time, an explicit indictment of history as a constructed entity built by those with power and influence. The day-to-day of the historian's life and experiences are drastic foil to the more mythologized portions, musing on the relationship between the stories we construct for society and those we construct for ourselves. Both narratives explore grief, forgiveness, and the inescapable human mandate to make meaning of difficult experiences at virtually any cost.