During a recent roundtable discussion on the affective crises of the millennium and possible ways of forging “bearable links” with the world, Lauren Berlant mentioned that “Being crushed doesn’t mean you’re finished, it means moving in brokenness which is what of course . . . trauma does.” Such subtle movements “in brokenness” are what the essays in Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma capture with their careful attention to the existential, ethical, political, and epistemic paradoxes involved in literary, artistic, and broader institutional and communal responses to traumatic events. Addressing contemporary and twentieth-century individual and collective narratives and practices of working through traumatic experience, the volume engages with a broad range of geographies and forms of expression in an attempt to “pluralize and decolonize our theories of trauma” (xxx). As the editors Arleen Ionescu and Maria Margaroni state, the collection proposes “a return to the resources of the humanities” to “imagine old and new arts of healing at the intersection of critical and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy, neurology, literature, the visual arts, film studies and gender and queer studies” (xix). Ultimately, it aims to question notions of healing based on the retrieval of a lost (experiential, personal, national, or transnational) wholeness.In rethinking acts of healing, the essays in this volume explore the ways in which different genres and media “invent,” as Mieke Bal, one of the contributors writes, “new forms for the formlessness of trauma” (93). As such, the collection is particularly alert to issues of scale—asking how creative forms articulate, match, or mediate the immensity and perpetual repetition of traumatic events; to the conflict of representation—the necessity of expressing the ostensibly unrepresentable; and to the liminal, oscillatory movements present in literary, filmic, and other artistic renditions of working through or moving away from an endlessly repeated or relived past. Offering “irreverent takes” on critical orthodoxies in Holocaust studies, the first part of the book highlights the ethical scales and stakes of critical form, notions of forgiveness, and the effects of humor. In the opening essay, Ivan Callus questions the very form through which critical reflection on Holocaust trauma can happen. His contention is that the controlled, precise engineering of academic writing threatens to impose a similarly coherent structure on the highly porous and fragmented experience of trauma and the “rigours of recovery” (4). As such, his discussion of literary fragments is in itself experimental, inspired by, among others, Montaigne’s and Maurice Blanchot’s versions of disconnected, fragmented writing. In a risky yet generously transparent mode of writing which resists claims to argumentative coherence and aesthetic wholeness, he ultimately asks whether literature can offer viable routes to healing. His question marks one of the central concerns of the book’s incisive enquiries into the sociopolitical efficacy of artistic form.If Callus points to potential incompatibilities between trauma and literary or academic discourse, in a different consideration of scale, Arleen Ionescu concentrates on the problematic mismatch between the humane gesture of forgiveness and the inhumanity of atrocities committed. In her close analysis of Eva Mozes Kor’s declaration of amnesty given fifty years after her survival of Dr. Mengele’s child experiments in Auschwitz, Ionescu contends that Mozes Kor’s forgiveness is deeply embedded in transactions of economic power play. As much as it might enable self-healing, Mozes Kor’s act eludes a Derridean pure unconditionality, Ionescu concludes. In line with her and Callus’s exploration of the fragile connections between form, tone, and healing, the last essay of this part focuses on the effects of humor in films about the Shoah. Lucia Ispas zeroes in on Roberto Benigni’s controversial film La vita è bella (Life is Beautiful, 1997), arguing that its humor intensifies rather than trivializes the cruelty and irrationality of the Holocaust. Ispas asserts that the film’s humorous approach is in fact a gift, one that makes both representations of horror and working through trauma more bearable.Moving from Holocaust studies to global sites of violence, terror, and loss, the book’s second part examines the politics and poetics of space in the work of contemporary Indian, Colombian, and Dutch artists, together with amnestic monuments in the Pearl of Punjab, and the recent tradition of makeshift memorials. Concerned with the interplay between stillness and movement, creation and destruction, and presence and absence, these essays pay close attention to the material elements of art that shape social discourse on trauma and commemoration. In a study of compelling artworks that “move and move us,” Mieke Bal attends to the intricate, trembling (technical, emotional, and political) movements in the work of contemporary artists Nalini Malani and Doris Salcedo that draw viewers into their shared, multisensorial space. These moving installations enable, Bal argues, “the reparation of broken social bonds”—the precondition for expressing and eventually healing trauma. In another reflection on the brittleness of social bonds, Ernst van Alphen explores the powerful art projects of Dutch artist Marjan Teeuwen, which reorganize the debris of destroyed family homes into painstakingly precise interior architectural structures. Discussing the facets of uprootedness caused by the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, van Alphen explains that Teeuwen’s patient ordering of material ruins stages a political intervention by evoking “utterly concretely” the workings of memory as architectural sculptures. Turning to a phenomenological reading of the “silent presence” of monuments in the city of Chandigarh, Punjab, Radhika Mohanram makes a convincing argument about the hidden layers of memory and forgetting. In a city where modernist architecture aimed to erase the realities of the 1947 partition, Mohanram identifies obscure sites of amnesia that reenergize precisely the memories they were meant to efface. In an illuminating account of the emergent cultural practice of makeshift memorials, Irene Scicluna describes more immediate forms of commemoration. Tracing the conditions, contexts, and political relevance of such memorials, Scicluna suggests that collective healing might begin when these communal responses to grief are eventually removed from public sight.The third part of the volume shifts from public dimensions of memory to more “intimate forms of healing,” charting the private spaces of autofiction, graphic novels, and artistic testimonials via fresh takes on psychoanalytic frameworks. Interrogating literature’s potential curative power, Laurent Milesi gives an intriguing reading of French writer Chloé Delaume’s autofiction in relation to her understanding of writing as “thanatopathy” (la maladie de la mort). In the following chapter, Olga Michael interprets American cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s graphic autobiographical novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) through its Wildean intertexts. Whereas Milesi sees Delaume’s “death-write” and reiteration of performative selves as a type of antidote or black magic, Michael observes the therapeutic opportunities lodged in Bechdel’s staging of intergenerationally transmitted queer trauma through the medium of the graphic novel. Moving from literary textures of trauma to artistic raw materials that stand as testimonies to gender-based violence, Nicholas Chare investigates Mexican artist Teresa Margolles’s installation art. In a thought-provoking analysis of the socioeconomic connotations of Margolles’s signature use of concrete, Chare expounds the promise of the matrixial to enable viewers’ “potentially transformative affective encounters” with art (225). In a similar vein, the concluding chapter of the book delves into recent psychoanalytic theory to emphasize the necessity of countering reductive conceptions of life. In Maria Margaroni’s cogent argument, Catherine Malabou’s and Julia Kristeva’s theorization of tenderness carries the hope of “reincarnating the empty husk of survival” (241).Hopeful of the prospect of healing yet carefully distant from universalizing accounts of trauma and recovery, these essays exhibit the urgent need to explore cultural narratives that shake off the “cool indifference” that Margaroni and others see as the new malady of the twenty-first century. The volume’s theoretical variety and engagement with multiple genres is admirable, together with its receptivity to the nuanced ways in which narrative “offers,” in Christina Crosby’s words, “not a way out, but a way into the impossible dilemmas of not-knowing” (200). At times, however, perhaps due its wide range of topics, relations between different concepts of healing remain slightly unclear; the reader would like to know more about how disparate notions and processes of healing interweave. Overall, the essays are deeply invested in unpacking the contexts and conditions under which consolatory, soothing curative practices might take place. Arts of Healing is a valuable contribution to interdisciplinary conversations in trauma studies, and an invitation for further enquiry into the contemporary scales of trauma and the future possibilities of healing.