Book Review: The Other Walk

 

Photographer Walker Evans once offered this useful prescription for a meaningful life: "Stare. Pry. Listen. Eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long." Consistently, in this masterly collection of 45 brief personal essays, critic Sven Birkerts's work is a testimonial to one writer's effort to take Evans's injunction to heart.

Like a modern-day Proust, though at blessedly shorter length, Birkerts's keen eye and sinuous prose are triggered time and again by the humblest of objects: his daughter's clay sculpture, a red tin cup cherished for 30 years, an inexpensive ring from his family's ancestral home in Latvia, or a child's drawing on a fogged bus window. "And somehow," he writes, "who knows why, when I saw that finger it was like someone reached inside and tapped the dial, put me square on my station."

But Birkerts's reminiscences focus as intently on personal relationships as they do on objects. In "Chessboard," an intense engagement with the game becomes a metaphor for the evolution and eventual death of a friendship. "The Points of Sail" recounts his son's brush with death when his sailboat capsizes off Cape Cod, allowing Birkerts to meditate in the aftermath of that near tragedy on "how it is between parents and their children... how it snarls up together, all the vigilance and ignorance, luck and readiness, love and fear. We know nothing."

With the demise of Borders, Birkerts's essay "Postcard," describing his years working in the original Ann Arbor store in the early '70s, might serve as an elegy for the bookstore chain. And Birkerts is nothing if not a man of books. "Truth is, I like the feel of a place that is overrun with books," he concedes. His love of literature and writing informs these often intimate pieces without dominating them. The book's concluding essay, "The Walk," a stream-of-consciousness account of an early morning sojourn, offers an informative glimpse into the way exercise rejuvenates the creative mind.

One of the occupational hazards of reviewing any essay collection is the need to plow through the volume from beginning to end, highlighting individual pieces while searching for a sense of the work entire. But The Other Walk is a book best consumed in slow, contemplative bites, with ample time allowed to reflect on and absorb them. And it's one that should be picked up, reread and savored for its expressive beauty and its gentle reminder that we can find life's fullness amid its most inconsequential moments. --Harvey Freedenberg

Shelf Talker: In 45 diverse and thoughtful personal essays, critic Sven Birkerts offers glimpses into his personal life and encounters with the world around us.

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