Reviews

4.5*
Whether she talks about memory, the self, passions, feelings or words, Siri’s essays from this volume really hit home with me. I could not help but highlight lots and lots of fragments from this book because they could mirror ideas that have been fleeting through my mind at times, ideas that I never could quite grasp.

She talks about places that live in our mind once we have left them in the essay/short story called “Yonder” which is my favorite from the collection. She talks about how we imagine them before we arrive and how “they are seemingly called out of nothing to illustrate a thought or a story”. She talks about things that stop being random objects once they are connected to a story, a person or a feeling. She talks about disparate memories that are very vivid in her mind while other more significant details are totally left out, making me wonder what the mind’s criteria of selection for remembering things are. She talks about her grandparents and her parents, about memories and time, about reading and seeing.

“The place of reading is a kind of yonder world, a place that is not here nor there, but made up of the bits and pieces of experience in every sense, both real and fictional, two categories that become harder to separate the more you think about them.”

In “A Plea for Eros”, she explores what makes us fall in love with some particular persons and not with others. And what exactly creates attraction.

“A combination of biology, personal history, and a cultural miasma of ideas creates attraction. The fantasy lover is always hovering above or behind or in front of the real lover, and you need both of them.”

In one of the essays she analyzes the subtle connection between words, memory and the self by applying her knowledge from psychology and neurology on Dickens’ characters that seem mad or seem to have a shattered inner world. “This story we call the self and articulate as I, Dickens tells us, is fraught and fragile, and we must fight to keep it together.”I thought that her way of applying concepts from science on characters from fiction was brilliant.

“As the connective tissue of time, memory is certainly essential to the internal narrative we create for ourselves.”

The essays about Great Gatsby and Henry James’s The Bostonians did not resonate much with me, the former because I am not a fan of Great Gatsby and the latter because I have not read the book, but I still could extract some really good ideas from them.

I really liked the last essay where she talks about how she met Paul Auster and fell for him and about how she would spend hours and hours in the library (I probably really liked this essay because this also really hit home with me).

“In college I retreated to the library. I have always loved libraries – the quiet, the smell, the expectation of imminent discovery. In the next book I will find it – some unspeakable pleasure or startling revelation or extraordinary nuance I had never felt or thought of before.”

“Some words, sentences, and phrases sit forever in the mind like brain tattoos.” And so do most of Siri’s ideas expressed in this book of essays.

catpdx's review

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2.0

A bookstore browsing pickup. She's another writer I have felt certain I'll connect with eventually, but this didn't help. It has not aged well - the title essay in particular - and I skimmed a bit toward the end.

_4hl's review against another edition

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5.0

Siri is one of the few authors that made me feel like I was sitting inside her brain while she explained how she sees the world and why she sees it that way. It's a weird way to describe how i felt but this is the closest thing i can come up with.. language isn't my best friend at times.

But this is truly an astounding experience, I enjoyed it a lot because I felt like i was getting to know her intimately through the topics she picked to write about, how she writes about, and what's behind her interest in various topics.. her essays were about her childhood, her parents, 9/11, living in New York, reading and writing, Charles Dickens... i can go on and on and on.. and i can't even begin to describe what they meant for me.
And the way she writes! Man I'm envious of how language seems to be her best friend, it's simple and elegant and deep and ...
I have seriously so much admiration for her. And I'm not even exaggerating when i say reading the rest of her work is one of the things I look forward to in my future.

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