## Question 7 by Richard Flanagan (2023) Not yet read — this note is a round-up of published reviews, assembled to decide whether to pick it up. Not Gerry's own highlights or commentary. ### What it's about A genre-blurring memoir/history hybrid, not a straightforward autobiography. It weaves together several threads: Flanagan's father's survival as a WWII POW on the Thai–Burma Death Railway (the same material Flanagan fictionalized in *The Narrow Road to the Deep North*); the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, traced back through H.G. Wells and physicist Leo Szilard, and the uncomfortable fact that the bomb likely saved his father's life — and therefore made Flanagan's own existence possible; the colonization and devastation of Tasmania; and Flanagan's own near-fatal drowning in a Tasmanian river at 21. The title comes from a Chekhov story containing an absurdist arithmetic "question 7" with no clean answer — fitting, since the book is built around unresolved, paradoxical questions rather than tidy resolutions. ### Structure and style Deliberately non-linear. Kirkus calls it "a narrative puzzle in which the pieces deliberately refuse to fit." Flanagan leans into the unreliability of memoir itself — constructed, in his words, from "the lies we call time, history, reality, detail, facts." Whispering Gums notes he draws on a Yolŋu concept of a "fourth tense," in which past, present, and future coexist — the philosophical spine holding the fragments together. ### Reception Broadly glowing, with a consistent caveat that it's demanding: - **Kirkus Reviews**: "haunting, jagged, sparkling" — appreciative of its intellectual ambition, but notes Flanagan frequently distrusts the very connections he draws between past and present, so the fragmentation feels intentional rather than resolved. - **ANZ LitLovers (Lisa Hill)**: "magnificent" but emotionally overwhelming — she needed breaks while reading and found it nearly impossible to review in a conventional sense. Reads it ultimately as a tribute to his parents. - **Whispering Gums**: humane, intellectually rich, resistant to easy resolution; praises the prose as "exquisite" and "insistent." (A Washington Post review also exists but sits behind a paywall — not summarized here.) ### Sources - [Question 7 (2023), by Richard Flanagan | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog](https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/01/10/question-7-2023-by-richard-flanagan/) - [Richard Flanagan, Question 7 (#BookReview) | Whispering Gums](https://whisperinggums.com/2024/03/03/richard-flanagan-question-7-bookreview/) - [QUESTION 7 | Kirkus Reviews](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/richard-flanagan/question-7/)