All Transience is Only a Likeness: A review of Freud's Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk, by Matthew von Unwerth. Riverside,  CA: Putnam, 2005,  256 pp.

FREUD IMAGINED or recollected a walk in 1913 with a young, already famous poet and his “taciturn friend.” From this evocative image, Matthew von Unwerth has constructed the perfect stuff of microhistory: a portrait in miniature of three writers in conversation. He surmises that the poet is Rainer Maria Rilke and his silent friend and lover, Lou Andreas Salomé. Von Unwerth's wonderfully suggestive essay includes potted biographies of this trio drawn from their letters, among other sources. Perhaps the events described happened, perhaps not. The device enables von Unwerth literary license to quote, comment, and muse.

Stylistically the book is beautiful—as gorgeous as the scenery the protagonists imaginatively move through and worthy of his muse—three thinkers and writers, each brilliant in his or her own right. The reflections and writings von Unwerth quotes from endure in the span of our collective human heritage. His themes are eternal within the human capacity for contemplation and penchant for attributing meaning to life. The book is replete with ideas about the timeless and compelling issues: love, death, dying, separation, loss, mourning—“as necessary as life and death themselves” (p. 208)—along with melancholy, beauty, sexuality, sublimation, creativity, writing, art, health and illness, memory, closeness, friendship, authority, doubt, joy, war, evil, and suffering. These are addressed in recurrently counterpointing vignettes depicting the lives, times and meetings of the three main characters as well as many others who mattered