In The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost) takes what could have been a conventional memoir about an adult child confronting the advancing dementia of a mother with whom she's had a troubled relationship and turns it into a collection of impressive essays on empathy and the power of stories. This book overflows with Solnit's characteristically intriguing juxtapositions of ideas, drawn from a deep well of learning on a staggering range of topics, then filtered through the prism of her broad associative intelligence.
The improbable thread that unites these essays is the delivery of 100 pounds of apricots from a tree at her mother's home in the midst of her prolonged struggle with Alzheimer's disease. Like Proust's madeleine, the fruit "became a catalyst that made the chaos of that era come together as a story of sorts." Solnit's effort to deal with that fruitful overabundance propels her into a consideration of subjects that range from climate change to leprosy to cannibalism, many of them related at least obliquely to considering "the capacity to feel what you do not literally feel."
Disclosing that Solnit's essays consider figures as diverse as Mary Shelley, Che Guevara and Siddhartha Gautama only begins to hint at the breadth of her knowledge, presented in a style that's understated, not ostentatious. There's an unaffected quality to her prose that's always deployed in the service of telling a good story.
Solnit describes The Faraway Nearby as "the history of an emergency and the stories that kept me company then." The pain she experienced as her mother's condition deteriorated was all too real, but it requires a writer of her gifts to turn that suffering into art. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer