Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write
An Autobiography Through Essays
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Beschreibung des Verlags
'An uplifting work: complex, precise and bracing' Susie Boyt, Financial Times
'A profound book about the intrication of literature and life, about the modest, miraculous ways art helps us to live' Garth Greenwell
In twenty-nine intimate, brilliant and funny essays, Claire Messud reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia; the complex relationship between her modern Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt; and a trip to Beirut, where her pied-noir father had once lived, while he was dying. She meditates on contemporary classics from Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk and Valeria Luiselli; examines three facets of Albert Camus and The Stranger; and tours her favorite paintings at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. Crafting a vivid portrait of a life in celebration of the power of literature, Messud proves once again 'an absolute master storyteller' (Rebecca Carroll, Los Angeles Times).
'I can think of few writers capable of such thrilling seriousness expressed with so lavish a gift' Rachel Cusk, Evening Standard
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this moving and evocative essay collection, novelist Messud (The Burning Girl) reflects on family, art, and why she writes. Her essays conjure up an itinerant 1970s childhood moving from the U.S. to Sydney, Australia; visits with her maternal grandmother in Toronto; and summers with her paternal grandparents in Toulon, France. She illuminates the two women who shaped her her fiercely traditional French Catholic "spinster aunt," and her mother, discontented with having given up career for family. Reflecting on family vacation trips to the world's incipient hot spots in Ethiopia, Guatemala, and Sri Lanka, among others she discovers that regardless of differing ideas or "strangenesses of culture... always at the heart are the ordinary people, and there is just life, being lived" good preparation for becoming a novelist, she says. Art, she writes, has the power "to alter our interior selves," and she offers nuanced appreciations of, among others, Camus, like her father a Frenchman born in colonial Algeria; Valeria Luiselli, who tries to find new ways to "document" the present; and Marlene Dumas, a figurative painter "driven by gesture, and serendipity... and by the confluence of diverse inspirations." These intimate, contemplative and probing essays reveal Messud's rich inner life and generosity of spirit.
