Can You Tolerate This?
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- 9,99 €
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- 9,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2019
WINNER OF A WINDHAM-CAMPBELL PRIZE 2017
'I love this book' MAGGIE NELSON
'An essay collection unlike any I've read' New York Times
In Can You Tolerate This? Ashleigh Young ushers us into her early years, coming of age in a small town in the faraway yet familiar New Zealand, yearning for a larger and more creative life. As Young's perspective expands, a series of historical portraits – a boy with a rare skeletal disease, a French postman who built a stone fortress by hand, a generation of Japanese shut-ins – strike unexpected personal harmonies, as an unselfconscious childhood gives way to painful shyness in adolescence. As we watch Young fall in and out of love, undertake intense physical exercise that masks something deeper, and gradually find herself through her writing, a highly particular psyche comes into view: curious, tender and exacting in her observations of herself and the world around her.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Young (Magnificent Moon) makes her nonfiction debut with this collection of probing, if sometimes pretentious, essays about growing up and becoming an adult. Refreshingly, she acknowledges that her own coming-of-age was far from unique, and the best selections are those in which Young takes some critical distance from herself. Her voice is more confident and her sentences more pointed in these pieces, such as an investigation of Japanese hikikomoris' hermit lifestyles in "Sea of Trees." "Witches," about discovering the taboo of nudity as a child and becoming trapped within the accompanying body self-consciousness, takes on more resonance placed next to "Bones," about a young boy becoming trapped in his own body by a rare bone disorder. However, Young's autobiographical essays can still fall into the trap of faux-profound navel-gazing: "I was ashamed of myself, now, for asking so insistently what I could do with stories I only half understood. I stopped writing about Big Red and all I wanted it to symbolize," she writes about her brother's favorite jacket. It's clear Young believes that, as she writes about the hikikomori, "immersion is the desired state" for self-discovery, but Young seems to learn the most about herself, and find the most to teach her readers, when she can immerse herself in a state that isn't her own.
