Review: The Lost History of Dreams

 If you like to be on solid ground, Ms. Waldherr’s book may not be for you. But if you like unreliable narrators and the tension they create when you know they’re unreliable, she has nested one unreliable narrator inside another, so that you never quite no who you’re dealing with. And the narrators so reflect the people whose stories they’re narrating that it becomes a game of fun-house mirrors. And some of the most important characters may be ghosts, whether real or imagined by two people trapped in the past.

Robert starts with a simple task, His cousin, famous poet Hugh de Bonne, has died, and wishes to be laid by the side of his wife Ada in the stained-glass shrine he built for. There’s a strange codicil in his will, however, which Ada’s niece Isabelle refuses to bow to—and she’s the only one with a key to the shrine. Her reason is bound up in the history of Hugh and Ada, which she proposes to relate to Robert in a mock-Scheherazade style.  But instead of making things clearer, it merely draws Robert deeper into a net of doubts.

All is laid bare at the end, and I’ll leave you to decide whether it’s a satisfying denouement. But this Gothic-soaked joy-ride is worth your time one way or the other.