After nearly drowning, eight-year-old Maeve Wilhelm falls into a strange comatose state. As years pass, it becomes clear that Maeve is not physically aging. A wide cast of characters finds themselves pulled toward Maeve, each believing that her mysterious “sleep” holds the answers to their life’s most pressing questions. As Maeve remains asleep, the characters grapple with a mysterious new technology and medical advances that promise to ease anxiety and end pain, but instead cause devastating side effects.
...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.
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.