Fireflies
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
How do we even begin to narrate the history of the world? Where do we start, and where do we end? Fireflies is Sagasti’s bold and original attempt to answer these questions. Roaming across time and geography, he lights on an eclectic array of characters and events that at first glance seem unrelated, and teases out their stories to reveal unexpected points of contact between them. Stanley Kubrick, Joseph Beuys, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Neil Armstrong, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Beatles, Japanese poets, Brazilian priests, Russian cosmonauts and many more cross these pages, and Sagasti finds common threads that weave them together into a single narrative.The fireflies themselves perhaps provide the key to understanding this book. They become a metaphor for the resistance of certain luminous moments, certain twinkling fragments of history, to the passing of time. They remind us that events do not always simply disappear neatly into the darkness, but rather remain, floating in the air, lighting up the night sky indefinitely. Sagasti shows us that the present moment, like this novel, is a tapestry woven of a multiplicity of times.Using his unique, poetic and keenly observant style, Sagasti transforms the accidents of history into a single, lyrical constellation, and for the reader it is an extraordinary sight.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Argentinian writer and critic Sagasti (Maelstrom) presents a genre-defying collection of associative musings on art, music, philosophy, and literature, centered on the theme of flight. The book's title is a metaphor encompassing the luminaries Sagasti weaves into this conversation Kurt Vonnegut surviving the horrors of war to write Slaughterhouse-Five, haiku master Matsuo Basho making a pilgrimage through 17th-century Japan, Wittgenstein creating his masterwork, the Tractatus, while serving in the Austrian army during WWI. Addressing flight in a literal context, Sagasti chronicles the story of Brazilian priest Adelir de Carli, who died in 2008 after launching himself skyward in a chair strapped to a thousand helium balloons, and of author-aviator Antoine de Saint-Exup ry, shot down in 1944 by a German fighter pilot who never forgave himself for killing "the Little Prince" (conflating Saint-Exup ry with his most famous character). Sagasti displays a remarkable gift for identifying what makes an artist distinctive, such as how the skill of haiku writers "lies in discovering the reverse side of the word even while writing it correctly." His meandering journey through the arts may not suit all tastes, but readers willing to approach it for what it is essentially, a book-length prose poem will be rewarded with a rich experience.
