The Faraway Nearby
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Gifts come in many guises. One summer, Rebecca Solnit was bequeathed three boxes of ripening apricots, which lay, mountainous, on her bedroom floor - a windfall, a riddle, an emergency to be dealt with. The fruit came from a neglected tree that her mother, gradually succumbing to memory loss, could no longer tend to. From this unexpected inheritance came stories spun like those of Scheherazade, who used her gifts as a storyteller to change her fate and her listener's heart.
As she looks back on the year of apricots and emergencies, Solnit weaves her own story into fairytales and the lives of others - the Marquis de Sade, Mary Shelley and Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. She tells of unexpected invitations and adventures, from a library of water in Iceland to the depths of the Grand Canyon. She tells of doctors and explorers, monsters and moths. She tells of warmth and coldness, of making art and re-making the self.
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.
