The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven

Hypnotic, surreal, heartbreakingly brutal and unfathomably beautiful, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint’s The End of Peril is a tale that unfolds with a resonant, graceful urgency—one that left me spellbound, devastated, and renewed. I savored every sentence—every brutally gorgeous line.

The animals have gone wild and the walls of the house tremble in the face of the fierce, loud hush that haunts Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint’s marvelous debut. I was taken from the first page to the last by Myint’s extraordinary sentences, which put me happily in mind of Marie Redonnet or Renee Gladman, and by the powerfully strange world of cities and families and searching they build. There is so much to admire here, not least one of my favorite moments in recent contemporary writing: a young women who uses the blade of her hair to cut off chunks of the moon. I can’t recommend The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven strongly enough.

What an amazingly beautiful changeling of a book. Whenever I was sure I had a pulse on it, it would bloom into something else entirely. Within what seems to be such spareness of words, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint invokes a whole universe that clutches close the realms of memory, dream, and imagination, erasing the boundaries between the living and the dead, the sky and the earth, reality and myth. Myint interrogates the mother/daughter relationship as well as the beginnings and endings of love and life, reminiscent of the myth-making poetic prose in Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River. In the subtle guise of Italo Calivno’s Invisible Cities, she philosophizes on spaces and habitude and internal strife. You will fall deep into the deepest darkness and fear and hope and desire and love and longing in these pages. It’s a lovely journey there and out.