Deliberately or not the past was always being forgotten, in all places and among all peoples, a phenomenon that had less to do with the forces that seek to erase or rewrite history than simply the nature of time, with the precedence the present always seems to have over what has come before, the precedence not of the present moment, which we never seem to have access to, but of the present situation, which is always demanding our attention, always so forceful and vivid and overwhelming that as soon as one of its elements disappears we forget it ever existed.

This is one of those books with which an effort to articulate everything you've read is futile. It's an experience with which you have to live, and time and again as your memory permits, have to come back to it, scouring from its depths another profound aspect of life and death.
It is at once an account of a war-torn past, lost love and the cycle of time and death. Everything it possess, it serves beneath a layer of stream-of-consciousness writing, which requires an effort in itself but a rewarding one.