Sometimes short/er stories can do so much more than long/er stories. In the case of Monumenta’s 122 pages I felt transported into my imagination over and over again, not really caring whether some scenes were dreams or were actually happening. We’re asked to imagine a series of conceptual monuments to a terrible massacre. So much of the novel’s drama happens in the reader’s head while the action doesn’t venture far from a house and garden (the site where this proposed monument is to be placed).

What this odd, funny, beautiful novel did was make me question the very nature of commemoration.
How do you begin to create a monument to a massacre? It’s too big a task to even contemplate. And yet people do. And these monuments get made. And they mean things to people. But life also goes on and on in the eternal present.