This week, we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month, The Museum of Human History by Rebekah Bergman.
On a small isthmus, a crowd gathers to celebrate (or, maybe, to mourn) the twenty-fifth year of Maeve’s sleep — an eight-year-old who’s hasn’t aged a day in the nearly two decades since she fell into a coma following a near-drowning incident. But she’s not the only anomaly on this island.
Rebekah Bergman’s astounding debut,
The Museum of Human History, breaks open questions of what you’re willing to accept in order to preserve what you might, eventually, lose; how to live in the face of dying and how to die in the face of living; what it means to be awake, and what that wakefulness requires; storytelling as an act of conservation; and the slippery connection between an imagined future and a distorted past.
What it means to be awake, and what that wakefulness requires; storytelling as an act of conservation; and the slippery connection between an imagined future and a distorted past.
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A company on Marks Island has started to offer a procedure that would stop all signs of physical aging — a procedure that’s possible because of a strange, red algae that blooms on the island. The characters in
The Museum of Human History all swirl around the riptide of this technology. An entomologist struggles to raise his two twins in the wake of unexpected, unexplainable tragedy; a performance artist, once a climate refugee, swears off the anti-aging procedure, even as she finds herself drawn to it; a man struggles to keep his museum, a personal passion of his, open as public interest waxes and wanes with the times.
The book is filled with small, beautiful axioms: how, in order to heal, “you have to learn to live with the itch;” how “as soon as a person exists, they start disappearing;” how “the story you tell becomes the story that’s told and everything untold is lost.” It’s a melancholy book, yes, but one that’s filled with the kind of wisdom that imbues the entire project with a goldenrod warmth.
"The story you tell becomes the story that’s told and everything untold is lost."
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The Museum of Human History is a novel that aches with grief and humanity and the beauty it’s possible to find in the world, even if you vision has become crowded with loss. Rebekah Bergman has written an assured and deeply felt debut.