I Dream with Open Eyes
A Memoir
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
A journey of reckoning and renewal, this story of family history and future dreams is an examination of the individual imagination as a catalyst for social change
Whatever the ideological slant of our information feeds, nowadays we all share a sense of binge-watching the apocalypse. Facing so much uncertainty, we need a language for thinking about the unknown not simply as a threat but also as a space of fertile possibility. George Prochnik has chosen to reflect on these urgent themes through the lens of a personal narrative: an account of his own family’s decision to leave the United States.
I Dream with Open Eyes begins with an exploration of Prochnik’s ancestral past: the pilgrimage of his mother’s family, who were among the first English settlers in the New World. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, a parallel migration unfolds as Prochnik, along with his wife and their son, makes the decision to uproot their lives in New York to move to England.
A deep critique of this current moment, Prochnik takes the words of nineteenth-century poet Heinrich Heine, “I dream with open eyes, and my eyes see,” as an inspiration to ask how, as a society, we might use art and literature to refract and expand our vision of the future, while simultaneously generating a new focus on present realities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A man flees Trumpistan in this overwrought meditation on politics and belonging. Prochnik (Heinrich Heine) recounts the buildup to his family's 2018 move from Brooklyn to London, an event prompted by disenchantment with his soulless PR copywriting job and by the presidency of Donald Trump, "the Frankenstein figurehead of apocalyptic capitalism." His exploration of the nature of America takes in his father's background as a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Vienna and his mother's heritage of Yankee do-gooding; extended disquisitions on Sigmund Freud's theory of the death instinct that allegedly powers MAGA xenophobia; and still more abstruse expositions on Renaissance painter Titian's Diana and Actaeon as a study in the structural power of whiteness. Prochnik's musings betray too much focus on Trump as the cause of everything evil. Several chapters revisit the trauma that the author and his liberal circle suffered on election night in 2016, which he compares to the sinking of the Titanic, the 9/11 attacks, Kristallnacht, and other Nazi outrages; the nightmare culminates in the "satanic Camelot" on display during Trump's victory speech, followed on the bleak morning after by an eerie encounter with an little girl chanting "We're all going to die." Prochnik's unfocused erudition illuminates little beyond Trump's ability to stoke hysteria in his detractors while robbing them of perspective. Photos.
