The Faraway Nearby

Summary (from the publisher): This personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy from award winner Rebecca Solnit is a fitting companion to her beloved A Field Guide for Getting Lost.

In this exquisitely written new 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.

 

Review: "After years in New York City, Georgia O'Keeffe moved to rural New Mexico, from which she would sign her letters to the people she loved, 'from the faraway nearby.' It was a way to measure physical and psychic geography together. Emotion has its geography, affection is what is nearby, within the boundaries of the self. You can be a thousand miles from the person next to you in bed or deeply invested in the survival of a stranger on the other side of the world" (108).

 

In this work of non-fiction, Solnit muses on some of her own personal stories and the art of storytelling and empathy itself. In dealing with her mother's dementia, her travels, and an illness of her own, Solnit reflects on the function of storytelling itself. This book is hard to classify, it's a meandering, lyrical journey and almost stream of consciousness as it travels through Solnit's different streams of thoughts. In its pages Solnit analyzes Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, leprosy, her mother's last apricot harvest, her trip to Iceland, and more. While this seemingly lack of focus was maddening, it was also the strength of the book, as it allowed the author to freely muse and capitalize on her thoughts.

 

Although the somewhat rambling aspect of this narration bothered me at times, there were so many insightful points made by the author. For instance, on the very first page, Solnit likens empathy to imagination: "Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there" (3). This idea of empathy's connection to imagination is explored throughout; If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink with their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those who feel compassion for all beings must be boundless" (107). Solnit continually takes the image of storytelling as a place and the difference between geographic and emotional distance and turns it continually on its head. "I sailed to Iceland on a raft made out of a book I had written. I had been sailing on books all my life and in my childhood had built walls and towers of books all around me to protect myself from an unfriendly world. That people were walking out of my books and pulling me into their world was a recent development" (71).

 

Indeed, Solnit delights in musing on established understandings to explore their undersides. For instance, darkness is frequently viewed and portrayed negatively in our society. "'Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that,' said the dark-skinned Martin Luther King Jr., but sometimes love is darkness; sometimes the glare is what needs to be extinguished. Turn off the lights and come to bed" (185). Similarly, she takes the opportunity of her mother's descent into Alzheimer's to view her mother in a new and more forgiving and empathetic light. Her mother's illness snuffed out many of the difficulties in their relationship and created a final, more gentle phase in their parent-child relationship.

 

Throughout this book, Solnit refers to a pile of apricots on the floor of her house, the last harvest from her mother's apricot tree before the house was sold and her mother was put in a nursing home. She frantically tries to sort through the decaying fruit and ultimately uses the good fruit in multiple ways but also uses these apricots in her writing, the image of this overabundance of fruit appears over and over in various disguises. The apricots include "under ripe, ripening, and rotting fruit. The range of stories I can tell about my mother include some of each too" (19). She marks time by before and after the "apricot summer" (67). Later, she is "pared like an apricot with a bad spot" (93). In her conclusion, the author reflects on the many things those apricots symbolized beyond just food: "Upon its arrival it seemed to be an allegory for something yet to happen. A year later that unstable heap seemed like a portrait of my life at that time, my life that also had to be sorted, the delicious preserved, the damage pared away. Processed and turned into jam, preserves, and liqueur, the actual apricots went onward as gifts" (240).

 

Ironically, Solnit is reaching out to her reader through her stories to make the point that storytelling is all about building connections.  This book is about the process of growing and connecting as a human, of paring down her pile of apricots, and building the stories she wishes to share. Although at times its disparate topics made this hard to characterize, the undeniable them of storytelling glowed throughout. This was written with a beautiful, lyrical style and made connections that kept me reading.

 

Stars: 4