SOURCE: “The Forest and the Trees,” in New Republic, August 7, 1995, pp. 37–42.

In the following review, Grafton offers a positive assessment of Landscape and Memory, which he praises as “a work of genuine originality.”

We rush across the gleaming surface of the ocean, moving rapidly but smoothly above the untroubled beauty of the dark waters. Jagged cliffs and wild surf, rugged hills and lush grass pass beneath us. Music plays. Finally we reach our destination, where the action begins. It may be a prison from which a psychopathic bomber prepares to break out, or a clearing where poor Scottish farmers will discover the hanged bodies of their chiefs, or a village where women will be impregnated by aliens. Whatever the details of the action that follows, the sequence of images—from any one of the fashionable movie openings of the last two years or so—teaches the same lesson...