History is a story that is at once true and false, a story in which truth sometimes requires us to record a falsehood, if only so we do not forget that a falsehood was once told. 

Rarely, if ever, does Christopher Ricks raise a point without matching it with some apt snippet of verse. Or, rather, rarely does Ricks raise a point at all; instead he discovers, within the verses of poets, the point he himself would like to raise and consider, so that reading a Ricks essay can become a game of hide-and-seek as the critic dodges and peeks from between the curtains of carefully selected verse.

The novel illustrates St. Catherine of Siena’s famous quote, “The path to Heaven is Heaven.” St. Catherine did not say whether the path felt like Heaven at the time, but she was certain that it was, in all essentials, Heaven. In other words, Heaven bleeds backwards into our lives, until every moment is colored with its otherworldly hues. That is the feat Vodolazkin accomplishes in this novel.

Terminal care no longer encourages us to balance the pursuit of treatment with emotional and spiritual support. Rather, the conversation turns continually back to, “What do we do next?” as though the body were a computer with a glitch in the programming. No heed is paid to the reality–that the time will come when we do nothing.