Confronting Oblivion: On Montserrat Roig’s “The Time of Cherries”

I finished The Time of Cherries on a severely delayed Amtrak train, at the very moment when I felt something akin to Roig’s “chaos of hopelessness.” The summer was off-kilter, with an endless deluge of “unprecedented events” playing out on newsfeeds and televisions. Flashes of abnormality, lighting up phones, tickering across widescreens, punctuated the dullness of long, excruciatingly hot days.