Down Around Midnight - Under the Microscope

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This is a memoir about a plane crash, and about the survivors who walked away from it. And while the immediate action (the crash, the dead, the living) is vivid and captivating, what is just as interesting about this book is the hidden damage, the tucked away wounds that the survivors carry away with them, often buried deep in their subconscious. It is these hidden wounds that tie the survivors together, that form links between them as the author, Robert Sabbag, searches them out years later. These are the wounds they hide from themselves, even though to the people around them they are all too obvious.

While none of the survivors could deny the facts (that their plane wrecked its landing and crashed in the middle of a forest a long way from anywhere) of what happened, they all, at times, seemed to deny that these facts had an important impact upon them, as if unfazed by the dead and their own precarious lives.

This is a book about those broken bits of time, those shattered moments, and how they live on, and how sometimes they must be met again at a later date. Sometimes memory and healing comes in shared moments between intimately connected strangers.