Frieda, too, experiences the ability to send and receive thoughts, both with the living and the dead, using her trusty Remington as the recording tool:

Author Michiel Heyns (Courtesy of Michiel Heyns)

“Sitting at her typewriter, she became aware of the presence of another consciousness, of her fingers obeying not the promptings of her own mind or eye, but half-formed thoughts entering her mind of their own volition. . . . Yielding to the impulses of the usurping consciousness, she found that she could record them as smoothly as if she were taking dictation.”

These psychic communications are perhaps the hardest aspect of the novel for a 21st-century reader to accept. Although believable in the world of the story, such moments effectively erect an emotional barrier between Heyns’s fictional world andThe incident seemed like so many others from this war, the kind of
tragedy that has become numbingly routine amid the daily reports of
violence in Iraq. On the morning of Nov. 19, 2005, a roadside bomb
struck a humvee carrying Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st
Marines, on a road near Haditha, a restive town in western Iraq. The
bomb killed Lance Corporal Miguel (T.J.) Terrazas, 20, from El Paso,
Texas. The next day a Marine communique from Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi
reported that Terrazas and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed by the blast
and that "gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire," prompting
the Marines to return fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding one
other. The Marines from Kilo Company held a memorial service for
Terrazas at their camp in Haditha. They wrote messages like