"BARELY HELD STORIES"

Michael Ondaatje, Warlight: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2018). "We never know more than the surface of any relationship after a certain stage, just as those layers of chalk, built from the efforts of infinitesimal creatures, work in almost limitless time. It is easier to understand the mercurial, unreliable relationship . . ." Id. at 256. "We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken . . . sewing it all together in order to survive, incomplete, ignored like the sea pea on those mined beaches during the war." Id. at 284-285.