...a startling novel about memory, desire, and learning to age with grace ... A cautionary tale about reckoning with the present, future, and the past, The Museum of Human History is a winsome allegorical novel.
Breathtaking and poignant ... Bergman's lyrical prose and keen character insight infuse the novel with near-constant moments of emotional enlightenment. The short, fragmented narrative structure masterfully intertwines not only the lives of its haunting characters but also a collection of themes that, despite their abstract weight, all feel emotionally grounded in Bergman's hypnotic reality.
Bergman’s novel raises some big existential questions: how does a person preserve their life after death? Should we dare to try? Trying might cause us to become consumed by the pursuit and miss the experience of life itself. Instead, Bergman relentlessly argues that sharing life with those around us is what matters most. Memories exist for other people after those who made them leave or pass away. It’s tempting to read Bergman’s novel as in favor of the romantic preservation of the past exemplified by the Museum of Human History and against the hubris of preserving for the future. But the novel is asking another question. In the face of centuries and epochs, we retain so little. Is there a third option—neither romantic nor technocratic—for holding onto the past? It would be reductive to say that The Museum of Human History wants us to “live in the present,” but in many ways this is what her characters glimpse when they truly encounter one another.
Each narrative ring reveals unexpected connections among them, images and bits of language that recur, ideas and themes—memory, death, the slippage between the past and the future—that deepen as the novel blends fairy tale, philosophy, and shades of literary-futurist classics like Never Let Me Go. With melancholy imagination, Bergman elegantly tackles nothing less than the entire arc of human history.
[A] cluttered yet satisfying speculative debut ... The cast slips in and out of each other’s lives, a narrative device that Bergman doesn’t always master—the large number of coincidental connections occasionally strains credulity. Still, the characters’ loss and grief are palpable. This will leave readers considering the fallibility of memory and the costs of attempting to preserve one’s youthful appearance.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
