Kim’s prose demands rereading. In the excerpt below, which comes about a third of the way through the novel, watch for the way that attributes of the setting, Amarâq, described in the first fragment as a place where “you could believe you are dead and yet still exist . . . perhaps one must say before birth,” manifest themselves in Inger’s love for Mikkel in the third fragment: “a timeless love, without space, an end . . . it would be a beginning and an end at the same time.” Note that both Keyi and Inger are thinking of a sentence, but not the same one. What initially seems arbitrary is anything but, and the more one rereads Anatomy of a Night, the more the fragments – trimmed and wedged and sanded first by the author, then by the translator, and finally in the mind of the reader – fit together.