I realized from page one I would love this book. I absolutely ate the prose up for one, and then the story! It had me hooked in the most dreadful way. The atmospheric folklore grounded in such a bleak and harrowing period of history gave the mystical elements a desperate realness. A War Story Is a Black Space was a masterful chapter set against the rest of the book as a whole that that first paragraph lives rent free in my head.

Look, I am holding up my two hands, and between them is Leningrad. ... A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead. Besides, what happened between the two hands I am holding up is squeezed between the pages of the books of the dead, which is written on my hands, because I died in that space.