Doctors told Lyudmila that this body was dangerously radioactive: “This isn’t your husband, it isn’t the man you love. In 1997, the year that Sebald delivered his lectures, Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich published Chernobyl Prayer (released in the US as Voices from Chernobyl), a tale of over fifty million radionuclides.

On the Natural History of Destruction wants to show that what we remember of our pasts, and what we choose to forget, shapes the character of every emergent world. Its disturbing simplicity passes from documentary to something else, like the slow footage of the whale fall.

The intimate ephemera and experience of human life—net curtains, newlywed passion, the panicky feeling of being caught in a rising wave—are involved with benthic organisms, heifers, potatoes, dolomite sand, cockroaches, flowering chestnuts, six-gill sharks, and Colorado beetles. A story is set running, and we follow it until it crashes into something, where something else is going on, and then we follow that.

Sharpe asks herself, How does one account for “surviving the ship when the ship and the un/survival repeat? Like Sebald and Sharpe, Alexievich is attentive not only to the human world, but to how anthropogenic destruction articulates itself on a wide landscape. The chronology of this natural history, as it’s told in the book, begins before the human community knew that anything had happened. I wonder whether and how much others felt that, in isolation: a powerful sense of entanglement or that the world outside was extra vivid. In plain, factual prose, the doctor recorded experiences in Hiroshima during and after the explosion of the American nuclear bomb.In this, an account of a bombing campaign, it’s Sebald’s attention to the habits of the flowering lilac, rather than his depiction of charred bodies, that feels out of place.