The Faraway Nearby is an impressionistic memoir/essay collection about a few difficult years in the author's life. Her mother was fading in an Alzheimer care facility, she was diagnosed with possible breast cancer, and she traveled to Iceland. (The last one is part of her recovery rather than one of her difficulties.) Because of Solnit's discursive style, she covers a lot of ground (apricots, Frankenstein, Che Guevara, lepers, Eskimos), but her primary theme is how we understand our lives through stories.
I typically enjoy writers who can't resist digressions, but most of Solnit's musings are too vague for my taste. Unlike, say, Nicholson Baker, she doesn't ground her abstractions with details, and they drift away.
I typically enjoy writers who can't resist digressions, but most of Solnit's musings are too vague for my taste. Unlike, say, Nicholson Baker, she doesn't ground her abstractions with details, and they drift away.
The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.The best chapters are the ones dealing with her trip to Iceland, because the specific details outweigh the academic New Age fiddle faddle. (The first chapter made me want to go to Iceland immediately!) The weakest chapters are those about her mother, because she implies stereotypical conflicts between mother and daughter but never makes them clear.
No comments:
Post a Comment