The concepts of time, memory and perspective are elusive and finicky. In Sarah Minor’s Carousel (Yale University Press), our speaker attempts to guide us through all manner of experiences that may lead us closer to an understanding.
Carousel, billed as “an essay on seeing,” is an ambitious and artful collection of vignettes that weave together scenes from art and cultural history, personal moments and universal experiences. The narrative revolves around the Bayeux Tapestry, a giant embroidered cloth dating back to the 11th century, that depicts the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings. The tapestry serves as Carousel’s central image, revisited throughout the book, anchoring the discussion of time and objectivity to this ancient document.
Interwoven with the tapestry — which is not our only recurring image — are scenes of lectures depicted over video chat and in the classroom, first-person stories of family members with age-related memory loss, discussions of different artists and their work (including René Magritte, Kara Walker and Joseph Dufour), hot air balloons, photography and more. Each of these vignettes asks the reader to re-develop their understanding of perspective and trust our speaker to steer.
Through science, art and history, Minor develops a panoramic view and trains us to resist misdirection. When Minor points us toward complications in histories long considered settled, she asks us whose story is being told. “[I]n art, the title is the small, offered orifice, the velvet tongue extended,” she writes. “A title is a painting’s collar. The title hangs on the painting’s every word.”
Time and memory dilate in Minor’s hands as she attempts to pin down what creates perception. Across the top margin of each page is a dilating shape (which I initially thought had something to do with the review copy I received) which gradually shrinks and then grows with the book. I worry that this is a spoiler, since it took me some time for me to determine that it was an intentional illustration and not an illusion, but it’s too good to leave out.
Minor shares early allusions to the panorama, my favorite being Airopaidia, a book of hand-drawn landscapes by the aeronaut Thomas Baldwin which came with complex instructions asking readers to “open the book flat on a table, to roll up a piece of paper, press the tube to their eye, and then follow a dotted line across the page to witness a gaze ‘bounded by the circularity of vapor,’ as if they were peering through a hole in the floor of a basket skating through clouds,” Minor describes. “Baldwin’s color drawings rendered the earth as a set of concentric circles.”
Minor also explores decollation. “Decollation severs a figure from its context … It’s the artist’s opportunity to meet or dodge the gaze.” This explanation serves to underscore the book’s thematic core: we can only know what we perceive, and whatever context is attached to that will color our experiences. The things we see are filtered through lens, reflection, in relief, and in negative.
Beyond the vignettes being educational and necessitating introspection, a huge draw of this book is Minor’s sweeping lyricism. As often as I stopped reading to absorb information, I paused to underline some gorgeous phrasing. Minor’s questions in Carousel, about what is measurable and who controls what, may be her own version of the Airopaidia.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s August 2026 issue.
