The Faraway Nearby
Rebecca Solnit
[Granta]
In The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit intersperses autobiographical snapshots with musings on everything from Che Guevara to arctic exploration. Often, the connections between them are only tenuous; the book’s structure seems driven only by the rhythms and appetites of its author’s voracious mind. If she sometimes gets carried away with a particular digression about St. Francis or *vanitas* paintings, however, she never loses her train of thought, circling back to connect each story back to her own. Much of the plot – if the book can be said to have one – focuses on Solnit’s relationship with her mother and the latter’s descent into Alzheimer’s, as well as Solnit’s own brush with cancer. It’s impossible to tell if the peripheral tales are only relevant as far as they illuminate this central storyline, or the other way around. “My own story in its particulars hardly interests me now”, she writes, an unlikely sentence in a memoir.
Solnit suggests that we can change our lives by changing the stories we tell ourselves; and we change those stories by acknowledging the stories of others: “one of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another’s story”. This is not necessarily groundbreaking stuff. However, in making The Faraway Nearby as much about the reader as it is about the writer, Solnit manages to do what many memoirists aspire to but few accomplish: she turns the personal into the universal.
Words: Eliza Ariadna Kalfa
