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4.23 AVERAGE
4.23 AVERAGE
I love the way that Solnit thinks, and I love the way that she writes about what she thinks. I heard her read aloud from this book on her recent book tour, and the themes it takes up -- story, empathy, Alzheimer's and the loss of self, metamorphosis, and different registers of intimacy with those near and the far -- resonated with me on a number of levels. The book pulled me in immediately with tales of apricots and her mother's steady decline. The further the stories moved away from that centering tale, the less captivated I was by the narrative. It was still all interesting. Just not captivating. I may have wanted something from it that it was never prepared to give.
Things I particularly loved about it: the deft and masterful interweaving of many kinds of stories, the nuanced and considered attention to both Buddhist and Christian thought and practice, and the ongoing meditation on the self. I hadn't expected the flat affect of Solnit's voice, and I found it unsettling throughout. I'm not sure if that's a weakness or a strength. It certainly illustrated the sense of being "faraway nearby." Regardless, it's masterfully crafted.
I put the book down several times during summer busyness and then came back to it last night in a fit of insomnia. The final chapters returned more directly to the apricots and mother/daughter relationships and I was again captivated. I struggled with whether or not to give this book 4 or 5 stars, and I first went with 4 simply because I don't think I'll reread it even though several sentences and paragraphs are surely worth it. Instead, I want to read more of Solnit's other works. In the final analysis, however, I decided to give it 5 stars for sheer artistic brilliance in composition.
Things I particularly loved about it: the deft and masterful interweaving of many kinds of stories, the nuanced and considered attention to both Buddhist and Christian thought and practice, and the ongoing meditation on the self. I hadn't expected the flat affect of Solnit's voice, and I found it unsettling throughout. I'm not sure if that's a weakness or a strength. It certainly illustrated the sense of being "faraway nearby." Regardless, it's masterfully crafted.
I put the book down several times during summer busyness and then came back to it last night in a fit of insomnia. The final chapters returned more directly to the apricots and mother/daughter relationships and I was again captivated. I struggled with whether or not to give this book 4 or 5 stars, and I first went with 4 simply because I don't think I'll reread it even though several sentences and paragraphs are surely worth it. Instead, I want to read more of Solnit's other works. In the final analysis, however, I decided to give it 5 stars for sheer artistic brilliance in composition.
dark
emotional
sad
slow-paced
emotional
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
emotional
reflective
There are some really beautiful sentences (see below) and insights in this book, but they were mostly in the essays about her relationship with her mother. The rest of the essays, although they take us on her interesting journey, were primarily about writing; and though I like stories about stories (I liked her thinking on Frankenstein), I found these sections boring and skimmed them. So the book, for me, oscillated between wow and meh, and unfortunately there were more meh essays. But I really enjoyed the wow essays and will have an enduring image of her apricots (and all their meanings) for a long time.
A taste of the good parts:
“I think of human psyches as landscapes, and to the question of whether she was happy or unhappy, I think that others encountered her in a flower-spangled meadow that was highly cultivated, if not artificial, and I charted the authentic swamp of her unhappiness far away in another part of the landscape she herself did not care to know.”
A taste of the good parts:
“I think of human psyches as landscapes, and to the question of whether she was happy or unhappy, I think that others encountered her in a flower-spangled meadow that was highly cultivated, if not artificial, and I charted the authentic swamp of her unhappiness far away in another part of the landscape she herself did not care to know.”
Can there be more than five stars? This book has quite possibly become my favorite ever.
A book about stories, about threads, about sutures, about labyrinths, about mirrors, about ways of telling and ways of listening, about what we salvage and what we sort, about empathy and the imagination it requires, about illness and the necessity of pain, about emergency and survival, about your body as a territory, about how our expectations may be inverted, about transformations and transience, and about disappearing into the frame you create.
"Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason" indeed. This book is an emotional and intellectual adventure I have a feeling I will re-immerse myself in many times over the rest of my life.
A book about stories, about threads, about sutures, about labyrinths, about mirrors, about ways of telling and ways of listening, about what we salvage and what we sort, about empathy and the imagination it requires, about illness and the necessity of pain, about emergency and survival, about your body as a territory, about how our expectations may be inverted, about transformations and transience, and about disappearing into the frame you create.
"Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason" indeed. This book is an emotional and intellectual adventure I have a feeling I will re-immerse myself in many times over the rest of my life.
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Reading the first half of this book was like a spiritual experience for me. My body vibrated with Solnit's words because I resonated with so much of her story and her writing style speaks so deeply to my soul. Then we take a strange, cold detour to Iceland and the beauty and magic of her words stopped for me. She shares that she received a grant to travel to Iceland and write about it, and it seems that part of the book is jammed in as an obligation, as if a bad movie director decided to put a big, cold iceberg in the middle of a rich, apricot spring scene because she owed the producer a favor. The story picks up again with its warm river of words when we return from Iceland, so perhaps Solnit wanted us to feel lost in the cold along with her, but it feels more like an unnecessary detour. I also enjoyed reading the mini story/poem at the bottom of each page - visiting in with the moths who drink the tears of birds. Rebecca Solnit's writing is so intoxicating, I want to read everything she has ever written.
Woah. I feel like I'm a pretty good reader of contemporary non-fiction, but somehow I've never read Solnit before this book, and I feel like, with the trail of books she's already written, that she's somehow a source for a lot of what I like to read.
So, we get a single through line (the disintegration via dementia and ultimate death of Solnit's mother) that is interrupted, enriched, reimagined and signified upon by all manner of other things. So, we get the apricots taken from the tree in her mother's yard, too many and rotting, all at once, and a digression into mazes, triggered by Solnit's interaction with a maze-themed art exhibit in Iceland, which leads her to tell arctic myths, and also other stories about animals who become people and vice versa. And oh yeah, this sort of dominant figure of the book, about moths who drink the tears of sleeping birds.... It's a dizzying, echoing, reverberating book of ideas, all drawn into connections that surprise and reveal at the same time.
The book itself is sort of structured as a decent, or maybe a move toward the center, as titles of chapters/ essays repeat, front to center, center to back. And running along the bottom margin of the entire book is one more essay, a line at a time, that has striking connections to what is happening on the page it is appended to. Striking stuff.
The one thing Solnit doesn't give here is a sense of her own surprise. She never seems excited or moved by the connections she develops. Maybe it's because the material is obviously so clearly thought-through, or maybe just because it covers a period in her life that is a couple years past, but what seems legitimately mind-blowing seems to Solnit like it's the only way things could have gone. It didn't diminish my enjoyment of this, much, but it felt a little odd.
I want to note, briefly, the way this book is like Maggie Nelson's Argonauts, in the sense that both are writing a kind of autobiography book-to-book. You could read both writer's books back to back and feel like you were getting a single life story.
So, we get a single through line (the disintegration via dementia and ultimate death of Solnit's mother) that is interrupted, enriched, reimagined and signified upon by all manner of other things. So, we get the apricots taken from the tree in her mother's yard, too many and rotting, all at once, and a digression into mazes, triggered by Solnit's interaction with a maze-themed art exhibit in Iceland, which leads her to tell arctic myths, and also other stories about animals who become people and vice versa. And oh yeah, this sort of dominant figure of the book, about moths who drink the tears of sleeping birds.... It's a dizzying, echoing, reverberating book of ideas, all drawn into connections that surprise and reveal at the same time.
The book itself is sort of structured as a decent, or maybe a move toward the center, as titles of chapters/ essays repeat, front to center, center to back. And running along the bottom margin of the entire book is one more essay, a line at a time, that has striking connections to what is happening on the page it is appended to. Striking stuff.
The one thing Solnit doesn't give here is a sense of her own surprise. She never seems excited or moved by the connections she develops. Maybe it's because the material is obviously so clearly thought-through, or maybe just because it covers a period in her life that is a couple years past, but what seems legitimately mind-blowing seems to Solnit like it's the only way things could have gone. It didn't diminish my enjoyment of this, much, but it felt a little odd.
I want to note, briefly, the way this book is like Maggie Nelson's Argonauts, in the sense that both are writing a kind of autobiography book-to-book. You could read both writer's books back to back and feel like you were getting a single life story.
hopeful
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Favorite Solnit book