Farewell Transmission
Notes from Hidden Spaces
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- ¥1,200
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- ¥1,200
発行者による作品情報
In Farewell Transmission, Will McGrath guides us on a rambling quest into the
enlightenment of other lives. Funny and weird, heartbreaking and galvanizing,
these essays take us from Yemen to Lesotho to the Bronx and beyond. We find
Caravaggio at an Arizona homeless shelter and Elvis in rural Canada. We meet
street preachers and diamond miners and professional wrestlers and
ex-cons—those wilderness prophets too frequently cropped from the picture and
pushed out of the frame.
This
is a book of hiddenness: of secret lives and inscrutable passions, of ghost
stories and hallucinations, of excavations into landscapes rarely seen. Whether
he’s unraveling the mysterious history of a noose in Namibia or rambling
through the Driftless Area with a modern-day goatherd, Will McGrath is in search
of the invisible forces that bind us across our wondrous and troubling planet.
Like John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead and Leslie Jamison’s The
Empathy Exams, these dispatches pulse with electric prose and vivid
characters.
Farewell Transmission is a book about paying attention: to the concealed lives and hidden worlds we
encounter every day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Memoirist McGrath (Everything Lost Is Found Again) brings sharp observations and keen curiosity to these globe-trotting essays. In "A Noose in Hentiesbaai," he visits a beach town in Namibia and explores the different stories residents tell about how a noose came to hang from a tree in the town square. In "The Open Pits," McGrath goes to a diamond mine in Lesotho, where his whiteness gains him access to the camp's executive spaces and he's witness to stomach-churning casual racism: "I wanted to document all the ways these men were gentle and loving and seeped full of racial bile... their empathy cored out and replaced with an incurious blankness about those with whom they shared their days." In "Ballad of the Curtain Jerker," a chance invitation sends the author on a rollicking tour of Minneapolis's burgeoning indie wrestling scene, which fuses "Looney Tunes anarchy with wild athleticism and a healthy dose of internet-age self-awareness." A few pieces lean perilously close to navel-gazing, but for the most part the author's adept at capturing the world with a buoyant sense of wonder. Armchair travelers will find much to appreciate in these affable, empathetic musings.
