09 Jun 2013 23:25:51
This is an account of a descent into Alzheimer's, garlanded with stories that wrench sense from that horrifying business. Prizewinning American author Rebecca Solnit looked after her mother from the time she started losing her house keys until – well, until worse things happened. "Taking care of the elderly," Solnit writes, "comes without the vast literature of advice and encouragement that accompanies other kinds of commitment, notably romantic love and childbearing." The Faraway Nearby includes disquisitions on Mary Shelley and Frankenstein; Napoleon; cooking ("I always liked canning"); and on that dizzying Still Life with Lobster by Abraham van Beyeren. Solnit has a particular interest in fairytales and spins her own web – some pages on leprosy prove "useful for thinking about everything else, for thinking about how my mother had gone numb in some way, so that I became the limb that could not be felt". She includes a tender tribute to a dead friend, noting that more than 200,000 women a year are diagnosed with breast cancer in the US and more than 5 million Americans have Alzheimer's. "There are armies, legions, empires of the ill, the frail, the failing; it is the dark side of the moon we call being human."
This writer's own story is a central theme of this gripping book. When she flew the nest at 17, Solnit was presented by her parents with a broken suitcase and a travel clock that didn't work, and they never gave her anything else again. Her mother was "devoured by envy for decades", jealous in particular of her only daughter's blond hair (the author's three brothers, meanwhile, walked on water, says Solnit). "Much later, when she couldn't come up with my name or explain our relationship," the author writes of her mum, "I didn't care, since being recognised hadn't exactly been a boon." That is a clumsy sentence – and it is not the only one. At some points in the narrative Solnit careers into "Hello Trees" territory ("The self is a patchwork of the felt and the unfelt"). I was not keen on her Martin Amis-style comparison, halfway through The Faraway Nearby, between a personal surgical procedure and the torture of Iraqi prisoners by US military personnel. But when a writer takes risks, one can forgive infelicities.
Solnit is tremendously interested in the polar regions, notably their symbolic potential. Antarctica "represented a kind of cold hope beyond society and personality, beyond the familiar and the ordinary, a landscape for extremists". The summer when her mother's situation was at its worst, and Solnit's boyfriend left her to boot, a cultural institution invited her to Iceland. "While everything else was falling apart," she says, "the far north came calling." The pages about that trip are especially good.
The author's previous 13 books include River of Shadows, a thrilling study of the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge, and many of the themes in that book are developed here: perspective, identity, that polar notion of "a land beyond the ordinary", and indeed the value of photographs themselves. Solnit deserves to be widely read here (she is much better known in America). I think she is the real thing, and at 52 – the very finest age for a female nonfiction writer – there is plenty to come. "Time itself is our tragedy," she writes in The Faraway Nearby, "and most of us are fighting some kind of war against it." Indeed. And what else is there to write about, in the end?
