A review by kylegarvey
Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography in Essays by Claire Messud

reflective medium-paced

2.0

 

Strictly not my jam I suppose, but overall Messud's essay collection is fairly worthwhile. As for the title, "reasons why" instead of just "reasons" is intentional, no? I assume Messud had her reasons for phrasing the title that exact way, but that'll make an ass out of u and me, so I'd better not assume. Maybe it was just roll-of-dice random; crazier things have happened. "Our human passion for storytelling—not simply for sharing information, but for giving meaning and shape to events—has motivated individuals and armies" we can relax a bit, ok (13). 

 

Well, nationality, first and foremost, has Messud touching the whole world: "My father was French, my mother Canadian. I grew up in Sydney, Australia; in Toronto, Canada; and then at boarding school in the United States" she writes in the titular essay (94). But unfortunately, the whole collection 'Kant's Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write' strikes me as not a good book, painfully pensive, clumsily expressed, most overwrought I'm sorry to say, thesaurus-burdened, MFA-colored in obnoxious relatabilities. 26 chances to prove different? Sure, and I'm sure there are many more after that. 

 

I like when day-to-day mundanity rides alongside those high-flown ideals: "Both figures have their Beckettian absurdity—my grandfather toiling at his desk (for what?), my father, reading voraciously alone (for what?)—but both also represent hope of a kind, and both inspire me to persist in my calling" (15), "The rules and rituals were endless, a language to be mastered and then—but stealthily, stealthily—trifled with. You learned the rules so that you might break them when the need arose" (25). 

 

But soon I think Messud spoils it, when she falls in love with her own prose. 'Fecundity'? "It is infinitely more real, blooming and billowing in the imagination in its fecundity and fullness, colored and enlivened by so many objects, so many sounds and smells, so many minute moments that can never, never be imparted… Like riding the red car: my sister just got on with it, which, in time, I would learn from her, to smile and smile and be a villain, and that our hold on this other life, like our memory of the red car, was not the less for that" (30). 

 

Could something or other "prompt at least a ruminative conversation" (54); "in the way of a Greek god: he was rather frightening, and usually not at home" (70). Lol. We all know about meaningful time vs. stupid time (37), including quiet bonding at the nursing home (39). Or so much that's overwrought anyway, ie. "vast, incessant sea, the enormous canopy of sky, mutable and immutable, eternity itself" (35), "the precise yet glaucous outlines of the buildings in Sultanahmet in the early day" (41), "Is the quiet banality of a place less real than its incipient evil? Isn’t life, most strangely, and even in evil, always made more real by its banalities?" (48) 

 

"palimpsest, beneath the city’s current geography. It is almost" (198); "a solipsistic failure of which we are all, with our PIN numbers and sudden fear of diseases, more or less guilty—that he proves a dark and possibly broken soul, someone for whom the role of flaneur is a hermetic one, rather than open at all" (204); "and he captures, too, the ways in which the greater subjects—violence, autonomy, selfhood, life and death—glimmer darkly in the interstices between bedbugs and Tower Records" (205); "superficially, very little happens. Szabó’s narrator, like the author a writer named Magda (in interviews, Szabó suggested that the novel was only thinly veiled personal history), follows the intricacies of" (210). Etc., etc., etc. 

 

Sorry. I'm afraid it doesn't mean much. I like stacking personal things, Camus (literary criticism), Teju Cole and Magda Szabó and Rachel Cusk (book review), Marlene Dumas and Sally Mann (aesthetic criticism); but the whole just has a formless 'Ok. Why?' thing going. And going. And going. Don't ask me to make a book, or it might be a lot like this; and that's not inspirational or anything, more just a warning, from her to me, I guess, or something.