The Faraway Nearby

This is a beautiful book, seemingly inspired by the loss of her mother, where Ms. Solnit takes on an idiosyncratic journey through disintegration and hints of rebirth. Framed by a pile of apricots from her mother’s tree, we travel through Ms. Solnit’s present and her reflections on everything from history to the writing she creates and the literature that inspires her.I was already taken by this book when I saw the table of contents and wondered how she would make use of the symmetry of the chapters. I was immediately brought into the quirkiness of her style when I started reading the passage that runs in a single line along the bottom of the pages. It seems to be her way: a subtle logic to her stories that has a personality unique to herself.Ultimately, I found this book to be many things. It is informative and moving, personal and universal, captivating and inducing of intellectual challenge. I have come very much to enjoy Ms. Solnit’s style and look forward to reading more of her.

Rebecca Solnit opens The Faraway Nearby with 100 pounds of apricots, collected from her ailing mother's tree, ripening and rotting on Solnit's floor, a bequest and a burden as if from a fairy tale. The fruit was a story, she explains, and also "an invitation to examine the business of making and changing stories." So Solnit tells her own story. And shows how she escaped it by entering the wider world of others' stories, and how she changed her story as she better understood her unhappy mother and their bad relationship.A key to this unusual book--which has the air of a classic about it--is the story in The Thousand and One Nights of the sultan who, cuckholded by his queen, decides to sleep with a new virgin every night and kill her in the morning. A woman, Scheherazade, volunteers to end the slaughter by telling the jealous man endless stories, distracting him with suspense so that he spares her life; in time she bears three sons, and he becomes less murderous. "Those ex-virgins who died were inside the sultan's story," Solnit writes. "Scheherazade, like a working-class hero, seized control of the means of production and talked her way out."By the same token, there are almost too many stories in The Faraway Nearby to list. Solnit has said she's a collector of stray bits, her method bricolage. Using that clue illuminates her apparent working method: there's been a patient melding, with brief transitions for topic shifts. This makes for more demanding reading--less warning of new topics and less time for a reader's preparation. You're immersed a new story before you know it. I love this book, but at times I struggled to stay on track; some readers will get lost and bored and close the book. I much prefer the way Virginia Woolf, one of Solnit's influences here, grounds the reader in time and space or in the movement of her mind in A Room of One's Own.Toward the end, Solnit returns to her mother and to her mother's end, to those apricots. Pared to its bones, she tells us, this book is the history of an emergency--her mother's traumatic decline--and of the stories that kept Solnit company then. But she tells us she'll resist the essayist's "temptation of a neat ending," and indeed she does. Questions flood in, a ripple effect of the book; her method, which meditates on meaning, doesn't always presume to supply it.

I don’t usually read memoirs. At least, I haven’t in the past. This is my second one in a month, and I have to say I may be changing my mind. Though I have to say that this isn’t exactly a memoir. It is, but not really. When you read it, you’ll see what I mean.From stories of her mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s to her own brush with cancer, the author weaves an intimate narrative about personal trauma and family relationships in such a way that we see the beauty amid the chaos, the poetry in the pain. Solnit’s ability to connect seemingly random and disparate elements amazed me, as did her insight. She seems to see right to the heart of things, touching the delicate pulse of truth beneath layers of superfluous camouflage with surprising power and sensitivity. More than once I would have sworn she was speaking directly to me; her words were that apropos to my own experience, that synchronistic to my own journey. Each time I felt her at my shoulder and had to put the book down for a while, so that I might fully absorb the impact of her words.Throughout the book, Solnit demonstrates the importance in our lives of the stories we tell ourselves. With a true sense of artistry, she lays words like breadcrumbs that lead us toward understanding. Gently, she challenges us as readers to examine our own stories, to recognize their power to nurture love or fear, forgiveness or spite, empathy or anger, recovery or suffering. Her words coax us to believe that perhaps, if we are willing to see our stories for what they are and what they bring to our worlds, we can make new stories that bridge the extremes and lead to healing.This is not an easy read. Its subject matter is far too thought-provoking. The Faraway Nearby is more a book to savor slowly, with a cup of tea or a glass of wine, perhaps on a quiet balcony or in a comfortable nook. And when you’ve finished it and put it down, keep it handy. It reveals itself in layers as you go, and will likely offer different insights with each pass, so you’ll want to read it again and again.

In this memoir and collection of essays, writer, historian, feminist and activist Rebecca Solnit writes: ‘The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the heart of anotherBooks are solitudes in which we meet’.I’m considering having that tattooed on my body somewhere someday.She is the author of seventeen books and I was drawn to this one after reading her essay collection A Field Guide to Getting Lost.One summer, Rebecca Solnit was given three boxes of ripening apricots, fruit from a neglected tree that her mother, gradually succumbing to memory loss, could no longer tend to. From this unexpected inheritance Solnit weaves together memoir, fairy tales and the lives of others into a meditation on the art of storytelling.She writes beautifully and philosophically about the complex and difficult relationship she had with her mother, having to be her ultimate carer without fully being ‘caught up in the currents of emotion’.I loved her ability to forensically break down a thought, a word, an item, into its component parts, discovering complex patterns and interconnections – apricots, her residency in Iceland at the Library of Water, leprosy, her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Che Guevara and Buddhism.Sometimes, she can be haughty, arrogant even, and I can understand how her relationship with her mother may have been mutually tense. But her moments of poetry more than compensate, affecting and effecting at the same time, the beauty outweighing all before it, as though she is holding your head in her hands and saying, ‘look, closely now – do you see?’The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest. Being able to travel both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outward and beyond. This is the expansiveness that sometimes comes literally in a landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story’.Threading these thirteen essays together is a fourteenth, written across the pages of the book as a footer, so that, having read the book once, you have to go back to the start, turning pages quickly to read the last story as epilogue.It’s a story based on a scientific article which reveals that moths drink the tears of sleeping birds, and she then lists all the things which produce tears: pain, sorrow, loss, thwartedness, joy, pattern, meaning, depth, generosity, beauty, reunion, recovery, recognition and understanding, arrival, love, mortality, precision.All tears are stories that make and unmake, connect and disconnect us with ourselves and each other. They are our potential.They are for the late hours when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are.‘It’s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions…’So when the opportunity for us to find direction arises, to make our own stories, it should be grasped, even if it brings tears. One should never turn down an adventure without a really good reason.

I enjoyed reading some of this book which is a memoir and also a collection of essays. I found some of it hard work and felt myself drifting off. I listened to the author discuss this book and that helped understand it more. However I did find it quite educational and it did get me thinking.

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Sometimes good, sometimes obscure, always American.

Fabulous book. What an amazing author. Really inspiring read.