Lifescapes
A Biographer’s Search for the Soul
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The acclaimed biographer and obituarist for The Economist reflects on a career spent pursuing life and capturing it on the page
'Lifescapes is the universe in miniature'
DAILY TELEGRAPH
It is soul that I go looking for. Or, to put it another way, real life.
'She's a genius, I believe'
HILARY MANTEL, author of Wolf Hall
'What is life?' asked the poet Shelley, and could not come up with an answer. Scientists, too, for all their understanding of how life manifests, thrives and evolves, have still not plumbed that fundamental question. Yet biographers and obituarists continue to corral lives in a few columns, or a few hundred pages, aware all the time how fleeting and elusive their subject is.
In this dazzlingly original blend of memoir, biography, observation and poetry, Ann Wroe reflects on the art and impossibility of capturing life on the page. Through her experiences and those of others, through people she has known, studied or merely glimpsed in windows, she movingly explores what makes a life and how that life lingers after.
Animated by Wroe's rare imagination, eye for the telling detail, and the wit, beauty and clarity of her writing, Lifescapes is a luminous, deeply personal answer to Shelley's question.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wroe (Six Facets of Light) draws on her life and her career as obituaries editor for the Economist in this freewheeling exploration of "the unique and essential part of ourselves" most synonymous with the soul and the challenges of capturing it on the page. According to Wroe, the clues to this essential self are found in the particulars: a sugar cake whose sweetness evokes a great aunt; "the gesture of taking someone's pulse, touching the fingers gently to the wrist, then falling silent to listen." Exploring how other artists aim to capture their subjects' "life-force," she notes that figurative artists complete the first study of a figure in "a minute, to catch not the shape or the mass but... to seize something more," while poets including Stanley Kunitz traverse the "boundaries between what they observe and themselves." In the end, Wroe suggests the soul might be best defined as a transitory force that is rooted in a love that operates "according to its own laws. Instead of pausing over our troubles, it pours itself out continually among them." Wroe delivers her perceptive insights into life, death, and the struggle for meaning in luminous prose, though her rapid shifts between topics (she moves from Fidel Castro's mistress to chess champion Bobby Fischer in a few sentences) can feel haphazard. Still, spiritually curious readers will be captivated by Wroe's wide-ranging quest to understand what comprises a life.
