The Angel Of History: A Novel

"The title of this book is also the title of a 1920 drawing by Paul Klee that was later memorialized by philosopher Walter Benjamin, who said the angel was looking back, not forward, at the devastation humankind has caused. This is the central idea of the book, the author says. We live in a culture that encourages us to forget, he told me, to keep forgetting and move on. So the main character, Jacob, who lost his lover to AIDS, is being forced to remember it all, no matter how painful, by everybody’s favorite angel — Satan."