An “unconformity” is a geologist’s term. It denotes “a discontinuity in the deposition of sediment”, “a material sign of a break in time”. But how can time break? Surely time goes on like an arrow, through one damn thing after the next.
Well, maybe it doesn’t. This extraordinary book will win devotees among that minority who don’t see “stories” everywhere, who resent the hegemony of narrative, and who perhaps experience time more like a spiral or, as Roberto Bolaño puts it in the epigraph, “not a river but an earthquake happening nearby”.
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