The Book of Unconformities - Hugh Raffles
Hailed on US hardback publication as “a spellbinding time travelogue” (Julian Lucas, Harper’s) and “one of the most mysterious books I’ve ever read . . . a dense, dark star” (Parul Sehgal, New York Times), THE BOOK OF UNCONFORMITIES is a powerful exploration of loss, grief, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present.
Unconformities are gaps in the geological record, physical evidence of breaks in time. For Raffles, these holes in history are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, memory, and understanding. In this endlessly inventive, riveting book, the author enters these gaps, drawing together threads of geology, history, literature, philosophy, and ethnography to trace the intimate connections between personal loss and world historical events, and to reveal the force of absence at the core of contemporary life.
Through deeply researched explorations of Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan's Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived in New York City along with six Inuit adventurers in 1897, Raffles shows how unconformities unceasingly incite human imagination and investigation yet refuse to conform, heal, or disappear.
A journey across eons and continents, The Book of Unconformities is also a journey through stone: this most solid, ancient, and enigmatic of materials, it turns out, is as lively, capricious, willful, and indifferent as time itself.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK OF UNCONFORMITIES
In a high-voltage jolt of insight, Raffles converts what might seem a dry scientific concept into a potent literary metaphor to help anyone whose sense of time has been fractured by loss . . . [His book] is so rich in erudition and prose-poetry that I read it like a glutton, tearing off big bites of lost time until I was sated . . . A poignant and healing descent into deep time and its relevance to the human experience.—Wall Street Journal
A work of poetic science, a smashing together of the human and the natural world, of cultures separated by time . . . Erudite and artistic.—Library Journal
A work of great originality and imaginative force.—Elizabeth Kolbert
The Book of Unconformities is, in an entirely seductive and moving way, the most genre bending book I’ve ever read. I’ve been unable to stop talking about it all fall. And I’ve learned so much. Only Sebald’s innovations struck me this wildly. Raffles takes a pair of devastating personal events along with him on an epic tour of the eccentricities and earth-shattering consequences of how and where we live with stone on this planet.—Eileen Myles