Name: Amy Thibodeau's review of The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit
Item: The Faraway Nearby
Rating: 4
Author: Amy Thibodeau

Rebecca Solnit

From the author of the memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence, a personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy – a fitting companion to Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award In this exquisitely written book by the author of A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit explores the ways we make our lives out of stories, and how we are connected by empathy, by narrative, by imagination. In the course of unpacking some of her own stories—of her mother and her decline from memory loss, of a trip to Iceland, of an illness—Solnit revisits fairytales and entertains other stories: about arctic explorers, Che Guevara among the leper colonies, and Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, about warmth and coldness, pain and kindness, decay and transformation, making art and making self. Woven together, these stories create a map which charts the boundaries and territories of storytelling, reframing who each of us is and how we might tell our story.

The Faraway Nearby

Linwan Song

A companion to A Field Guide for Getting Lost explores the ways that people construct lives from stories and connect to each other through empathy, narrative and imagination, sharing illustrative anecdotes about historical figures and members of her own family. By the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of River of Shadows.

Amy Thibodeau

Brittney Wilson

This was lovely.
“Who drinks your tears, who has your wings, who hears your story?”

One summer, Rebecca Solnit was bequeathed a hundred pounds of apricots - the fruit came from a 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 prolong her life and weave her way into the heart of a king. So too came adventure; in a library of water in Iceland, in the basin of the Grand Canyon, and in the emptiness of the Arctic. As she looks back on the year of apricots and emergencies, Solnit draws together the threads of her life with the lives of others.

Rose Stanley

Why did it take me so long to get round to reading Solnit's work? She writes so well!

Difficult to categorise this - I don't think you can call it a collection of short stories...it's as much about the art of (and need for) connecting through storytelling as it is about the tales themselves. 

The unifying thread, from a narrative perspective, is Solnit's account of a period in her life when she was forced to confront mortality and transience (partly through witnessing her mother's Alzheimer's and partly through having a brush with breast cancer herself), but there are so many (fascinating) detours into other people's stories that calling it an autobiography seems too narrow.

Instantly reminded me of Cloud Atlas because of its structure and the interconnections between each of the sections. Everything is beautifully and skilfully woven together, and the bonus story running along the bottom of each page is the icing on the cake (yes yes I know I'm mixing my metaphors).

In case it's not clear...I adored this. Will definitely be rereading.

Linwan Song &
The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

Reviews

Join the club

Linwan Song &The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

Reviews

Join the club

Linwan Song &
The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit