“This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.”

One of the other journeys through loss and Germany referenced in my last review (of “Sojourn”), “The Rings of Saturn” is a mournful collage of history, presenting in dreamlike, meandering fashion several episodes detailing the steady approach of desolation on the world. Heavy, but vulnerable too, like a child gifting you a flower or an insect. Record keeping that nevertheless breaks into song, into lament, attempting preservation by any means possible: melody, citation, photograph. But these, too, must build upon each other, must accumulate and obscure and in the end annihilate what came before; history forms too great and too precious a burden. How then do we continue?

Boys will be boys. Wandering and wondering and winding through the compound displacement of an exile in a land without identity. Fascinating style. Every word surprises, unsettles. Fitting tone for the expat in silent crisis.

The world is so wide and then you read three books almost consecutively, independently, unintentionally, treating of loss and memory through muddled pilgrimages by the German countryside, and then the world is small and very small. It’s a lovely sort of modesty, a soft act of grace.

This is poetry! This is philosophy! This is maybe “Septology” again! A gallery of pictures drawing near to God, gentle soft orbit, violating nothing, breaching no hard borders. Knowing Him in intimate closeness but not touching, not plucking and biting into the sweet dangling fruit that is near, so near. And am I coming closer now, mouth agape, and are the words I am speaking speaking God to you?

A favorite of one of my best friends, who writes herself like clear water, essays steeped in the fullness of life, and no wonder she should love this book: the simple stream of it, the swift-moving beauty. I loved this book and love her and feel better able to love after reading tender books like these! Yay!

Manic pixie dream girl and her favorite fascist incel — many such cases, though here more blatant, as every part of Collins’ writing is: more blatant, excessively surface. Not a career-ending quality, and certainly not for a YA book series, but a bit odd given how convoluted the plot can get. If we can trust the children to keep track of fifty of the most bizarre names you’ve ever heard, can we not trust them to make the connection to our modern times without a grand 4th of July mic drop?

Maybe not. In any case, appreciative of Collins’ including a much better text (Wordsworth’s “Lucy Gray”) as a possible alternative for her readers. Normally that sort of quiet apology to the reader is the exclusive domain of romcom writers — exciting to see it deployed in actual literature.