The Eternal City Book

Graber's innovation of the quiet resignation that borders on confessional paired with the historical figures such as Aurelius and Benjamin will either personalize the historical or it will strike readers as profoundly self-indulgent. I view the collection as, mostly, successfully achieving the former, Graber's lyricism and self-honesty run through the collection. Graber's innovations of the modern paired, such as references to Klaus Kinski, Werner Herzog, Johnny Depp, Jim Jarmusch, with the Biblical and classical allusions often work for the benefit of both. Graber's focus on the passage of time and our inability to deal with this properly is both ambitious and not entirely ambitious enough, and thus I think this leads the somewhat polarized response to this collection.