Degas at the Gas Station
Essays
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- $28.99
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
In his latest collection, Thomas Beller trains his piercing literary eye on how a single, seismic event indelibly shapes the trajectory of the common and mundane experiences of one’s life. Weaving together a charming set of autobiographical stories, Beller interrogates the randomness and contingencies that separate sadness from joy, death from life. His father escaped the Nazis, only to die in America from cancer when Beller was nine years old. Beller measures how this loss impacted his life as the father of two young children and became both a catalyst for understanding an ever-present sorrow. At the same time, ordinary moments—from retrieving an iPod from the subway tracks to encountering the police at a Kinks concert to observing his young tutued ballerina daughter at a gas station—lead to instances of penetrating insight, self-deprecation, and humor. Degas at the Gas Station presents an endearing and bracingly honest portrait of the author as an ever-curious observer of the mysteries and profundities of everyday life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tulane University English professor Beller (Lost in the Game) delivers a kaleidoscopic memoir-in-essays touching on themes of family, memory, and grief. He reflects on moments throughout his life both cataclysmic and mundane, from losing his dad, who had escaped the Holocaust, to cancer when he was nine to observing his young daughter wearing a tutu at a gas station, looking "like something Degas might paint if he went on a field trip to the Stop & Shop." Beller unpacks emotions that would otherwise remain lost in time, like the sadness he sees in his boyhood self, coping with his grief by playing with his late father's shaving cream. Along the way, he effectively demonstrates how his past shaped the person he became; in "Us and Them," he describes how he sang songs in Hebrew with his mother and, now a parent himself, hopes his daughter will stay connected to her Jewish heritage. Beller's lucid writing makes even the ordinary magical ("The music was propulsive, driving us at once into the future and the past. We were, in some way, traveling to both places together"). The result is a penetrating meditation on the human condition.
