The Faraway Nearby
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4.3 • 15 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
A personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy, from the author of Orwell's Roses
Apricots. Her mother's disintegrating memory. An invitation to Iceland. Illness. These are Rebecca Solnit's raw materials, but The Faraway Nearby goes beyond her own life, as she spirals out into the stories she heard and read—from fairy tales to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—that helped her navigate her difficult passge. Solnit takes us into the lives of others—an arctic cannibal, the young Che Guevara among the leprosy afflicted, a blues musician, an Icelandic artist and her labyrinth—to understand warmth and coldness, kindness and imagination, decay and transformation, making art and making self. This captivating, exquisitely written exploration of the forces that connect us and the way we tell our stories is a tour de force of association, a marvelous Russian doll of a book that is a fitting companion to Solnit's much-loved A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
San Francisco social activist and National Book Critics Circle Award winner Solnit (River of Shadows; A Paradise Built in Hell) fashions an elegant study in empathy through these meandering reflections on subjects as diverse as her mother's descent into dementia, Che Guevara, and Solnit's own "magical rescue" to Iceland for some months as resident at the Library of Water museum. Storytelling is Solnit's way of perceiving the suffering of others, she writes, and her first essays explore the decidedly mixed feelings she harbored toward her difficult mother as she grew more and more forgetful, revealing the dreaded symptoms of Alzheimer's. The author struggled to honor the "unremembered past" she shared with her often critical, resentful mother. From the rotting apricots gathered from her mother's yard, Solnit made jam, an act of stalling their inevitable decay a startlingly moving metaphor for vanitas. Ice is another preserver/destroyer, and Solnit segues nimbly into her explorations in Iceland by way of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which begins and ends on ice, with the polar explorer's narrative. Throughout, Solnit subtly touches on subject ranging from Guevara's contact with leprosy patients as he traveled around Latin America in the 1950s to the reach of Buddhism to Icelandic history, to her own health crisis and all in her enormously fluid style.
Customer Reviews
Story as Self and Other
An essay collection that functions as a tapestry of continuous story, weaving in and out of the time and space of the author's grief and musings about the wider world through the lens of nature and story itself. Conveys the empathy of narrative even as it explains it, making the reader part of this story even as it affirms the existence and importance of their own.
Solnit nails it again
Solnit has again written a book that encompasses the personal, the political, geographic, literary, cultural and historical. Drawing from her own complex relationship with her mother who is disappearing into dementia and her personal health challenges, she moves the reader into the world of myths and legends and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our world. Her writing is lyrical. More than once I stopped to read again a paragraph or sentence because it was so exquisitely framed and so poetically rendered.