In “Room,” an unnamed narrator finds herself locked inside a white room in Vienna, where she has come to finish a book, and becomes increasingly agitated. “Night,” the longest section by far, brings us another unnamed narrator in a room. This woman—a German writer—suffers from insomnia and spends her hours sifting through her own memories, imaginings, and histories, particularly those of women artists in pre–World War I Berlin. These pursuits swallow her present, which appears as a surreal kaleidoscope reflecting an almost painful sensitivity to the world around her. Her only companions are the “nameless woman” she shares the room with—a bizarre, mutable figure—and a neighbor she watches through the window. “Medusas,” told in the third person, follows a group of women and their children on a beach vacation. The women are glued to news of atrocities on their phones, only roused when their children are badly stung by jellyfish. The book closes with “Burials,” a second-person account of a mother and daughter visiting another family near a forest in central Europe. The mother (“you”) enjoys nature, sleeps deeply, and considers the family’s dog, soon to be put down. Later, she asks her friend to bury her up to her neck in soil so she may “lie down inside of the earth, enter the womb.” The narrator of “Night” notes that the artists she studies all suffered from “war, lovelessness, mania,” and the women Friedland fashions are no different. While its rapid shifts between thoughts and scenes can be jarring, this book succeeds in constructing a “lineage,” a “female history” (and thus an alternative and even reparative history) of women suffering through unprecedented times. In addition, Friedland conveys a profound truth: Awareness of this lineage is a heavy burden. When holding the weight of one’s own memories and the memories of the many that have gone, passed through oral storytelling, archives, and even the internet, how could one possibly rest?