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beritt 's review for:
Recollections of My Nonexistence
by Rebecca Solnit
I have rarely felt more seen by a book.
The things Solnit writes about being a woman, about reading, and about writing itself were revelatory to me. It’s like she has invented language for things I have felt but never knew how to name. Or no — language for things I have felt but rarely dwelled on, because they seemed so commonplace.
It would be like dwelling on the fact that the sun rises every morning — so normal that I’d never think twice about it, let alone think of exploring it further.
But Solnit book shows that all these things do matter: naming the unnameable, probing into seemingly commonplace and wildly obscure topics alike, just because it matters to you, as a person. And then, by extension, it might matter to someone else when it is written down.
I purposely slowed down towards the end of this book because I didn’t want it to end.
Now I’ll have to read everything else she’s written.
"I wanted urgency, intensity, excess and extremes, prose and narrative bursting against the confines. Except when I wanted reassurances. I found both. I lived so deeply in books that I fet unanchored an adrift, not particularly part of my own time and place, always with one foot or more in other places, medieval or imaginary or Edwardian. I had in that floating world a sense that I might wake up or otherwise find myself in one of those other times and places" (108).
The things Solnit writes about being a woman, about reading, and about writing itself were revelatory to me. It’s like she has invented language for things I have felt but never knew how to name. Or no — language for things I have felt but rarely dwelled on, because they seemed so commonplace.
It would be like dwelling on the fact that the sun rises every morning — so normal that I’d never think twice about it, let alone think of exploring it further.
But Solnit book shows that all these things do matter: naming the unnameable, probing into seemingly commonplace and wildly obscure topics alike, just because it matters to you, as a person. And then, by extension, it might matter to someone else when it is written down.
I purposely slowed down towards the end of this book because I didn’t want it to end.
Now I’ll have to read everything else she’s written.
"I wanted urgency, intensity, excess and extremes, prose and narrative bursting against the confines. Except when I wanted reassurances. I found both. I lived so deeply in books that I fet unanchored an adrift, not particularly part of my own time and place, always with one foot or more in other places, medieval or imaginary or Edwardian. I had in that floating world a sense that I might wake up or otherwise find myself in one of those other times and places" (108).