My key takeaways:

* This extraordinary book will win devotees among that minority who don’t see “stories” everywhere, who resent the hegemony of narrative, and who perhaps experience time more like a spiral or, as Roberto Bolaño puts it in the epigraph, “not a river but an earthquake happening nearby”

* The book is an invented composite itself – part travelogue, part memoir, part history, part psychogeography

* Raffles travelled to Theresienstadt and immersed himself there but eventually felt he’d “lost his appetite to add to the literature of terror”, as it re-awakens all around us

* In Hugh Raffles' profound, genre-straddling new book, stones and minerals reveal the pain of loss and the secrets of time

* When it eventually ends, it leaves you not breathless but wonderstruck

* The author travels from New York to Scotland, Svalbard to Greenland, but the first person features rarely; it glints, like the mica he considers in the epilogue

* Like Trinitite, formed at the New Mexico atomic test site in 1945, and plastiglomerates, first recorded in Hawaii in 2013, blubberstone is “a geological artifact of world history”

* Lifeways that have developed over millennia for peoples or animals can be snapped

The book is called "The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time" and you can find it on Goodreads here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48986277-the-book-of-unc...

Not the type of book whose review I would expect to see here. The reviewer was evocative enough for me to pick up a used copy on Amazon. Thanks for sharing.

I’ve never quite grasped, what does the term “condition” mean in this context?