Hot and Cold

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The Faraway Nearby1

By Rebecca SolnitViking, 2013On the taxi ride from Reykjavik airport our driver kept pointing to pipelines and steaming power plants. There was the geothermal station that harnessed natural hot springs to treat water for the city. Here was a cod factory that had found a way to dry the fish heads for export to Nigeria. Nigerians considered fish heads a delicacy, he said, and Icelanders were proud of wasting nothing. Connections like these—across cultures and distances—are at the heart of Rebecca Solnit’s new book The Faraway Nearby.Although her main theme is storytelling, Solnit draws on personal and cultural stories to forge connections between people and places. At the same time, she wants to investigate how spatial and emotional relationships create narratives. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Solnit writes, echoing Joan Didion. So she invokes Scheherazade, and describes storytelling as a way of life, interweaving reading and writing so completely that their boundaries are blurred. The book is constructed like a spiral, moving through a web of associations from an apricot tree in Northern California toward a stay in the Library of Water in Iceland, and then back again. In between she covers cancer, Che Guevara, Inuit folklore, Frankenstein, and insect metamorphosis. Each chapter is symmetrically linked to another: Apricots, Mirrors, Ice, Flight, Breath, Wound, Knot—and then back again, Unwound, Breath, Flight, Ice, Mirrors, Apricot. The “knot” in the middle is a brush with breast cancer.What to call this nonfiction that is neither a memoir (though it includes personal experience) nor a collection of essays (though the chapters stand alone as well as together)? Solnit begins with her mother’s dementia: she inherits hundreds of apricots when her mother’s house is sold and its tree harvested. Like the Icelanders, she wastes not, canning and distilling the whole fruit while musing on her relationship with her mother and continuities that last across selves and across time. The apricot wine will be drunk when the house, and even her mother, is gone. Solnit goes looking for other continuities, finding them in her childhood experience of seeing a film version of Frankenstein and being struck by the white world of its Arctic scenes. Later she can relate Frankenstein’s monster’s rivalry with his creator to her relationship to her mother, and Mary Shelley’s motherlessness to her own upbringing. It’s a personal history through reading in the broadest sense, where texts evoke multisensory associations.

2Photo by Christofer Lundstedt on Flickr
I think about Solnit while hiking near Thingvellir National Park, a UNESCO heritage site in the middle of Iceland. Soaked through with rain and sweat, I draft sentences of this review in my head. The landscape is euphoric: ridges of black rock run in waves and the ground is springy with moss underfoot. I ascend and descend steep muddy paths that become fields of rocky knobs. The high wind stings and the next red post marking the path seems very far away. Though July, it’s cold and I wish I had brought gloves. I think and walk and walk and think, wondering how to respond to Solnit’s book and this otherworldly terrain. Solnit describes her stay in Iceland as a breather, a pause where she rested after a difficult year:
In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula, up near the arctic circle on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds, under melted glaciers, inside others’ acts of making and imagination, inside the reverie of a young woman’s darkness and a species’ life in endless light, in a lull in the ongoing conversations and at a vantage point from which I could map them.

This passage is typical of Solnit’s rhythmic and evocative writing, her moves from the concrete to the abstract along a conceptual trajectory. On my walk I get lost among the red, blue, and green trail markers and wonder when anyone would think to look for me. If the sun doesn’t set then how is time marked? If it never gets dark does it never get late? I feel far from stable ground, but I am only three kilometers from my “luxury adventure” hotel, the definition of civilization. As Solnit notes throughout her book, distance is complicated. Her title comes from Georgia O’Keeffe, who often signed her letters “from the faraway nearby.” Distance can measure intimacy, but in unpredictable ways. Solnit describes Che Guevara’s visit to an Amazon leprosy colony, where he held hands with patients when others shunned them; she describes a Buddhist monk who wore a coat covered with tokens people gave him so he could symbolically bear their suffering. What do near and far, close and distant mean in these contexts, she wonders?

3Flickr photo by Grand Canyon NPS
All of Solnit’s experience is digested this way: read, reread, and then rewritten into this book. Her friend’s death, her own cancer scare, her trips to Iceland, the Southwestern desert, the Grand Canyon….these events are viewed through the prisms of her reading and then offered to us for our own reading, to make of them what we will. It is an intoxicating method that leads her readers through a varied and surprising terrain. Solnit claims the freedom of association over logic or argument; her book is constructed of fragments pieced together only by her own subjectivity. Sometimes the process makes for a rich and multilayered description — as when she retells several versions of an Inuit story of cannibalism in order to show how the present can literally consume the past, destroying it in order to survive. Despite differences in each version of the story, they all recount a mother who eats her dead husband and children in order to avoid starvation herself. Solnit relates this to the re-animation of corpses in Frankenstein and the re-use of human by-products (like skin grafts) in medicine. But elsewhere the device can seem choppy and random. For example, she writes, “the modern world of blood transfusions and organ transplants has been referred to by one writer as a noble cannibalism.” Then the next paragraph makes that metaphor suddenly literal: “But there is now a global trade in kidneys.”These metaphorical connections can feel forced too: “As it turned out, the lump was benign; the relationship, however, was malignant from then on.” Her mother’s breast cancer scare will mirror her own years later, but Solnit’s complaints about her mother can grow wearying, perhaps because they are so ordinary: mother complains daughter doesn’t visit, daughter complains mother doesn’t appreciate her caretaking … But if Solnit’s insights about this relationship aren’t profound, at least her language is lovely:
I thought of her [mother’s] unhappiness as a sledge to which I was tethered. I dragged it with me and studied it in the hope of freeing myself and maybe even her.

She elegantly shows how the mother-daughter connection became a disconnection, but if this relationship too is a “story” it has no clear conclusion.4By now I have followed Solnit from continent to continent, wondering if the book is an experiment in form or whether it has an implicit argument. During a heat wave in New York City, I look for a through line in Solnit’s labyrinth of connections. Yet she ends the book with questions and insists on open-endedness, even within the tight construction of recursive chapters. So maybe it is enough to appreciate her evocative language, her joy in words, and her engaging curiosity: maybe the book should be taken on its own terms – as an experiment in digressive form. Solnit refuses to make sense for us, instead envisioning reading as an act of imagination:

Imagine all the sentences in this book as a single thread around the spool that is a book. Imagine that they could be unwound; that you could walk the line they make, or are walking it. Reading is also traveling, the eyes running along the length of an idea, which can be folded up into the compressed space of a book and unfolded within your imagination and your understanding.

Solnit has in fact given us that unspooled book: the hardcover version of The Faraway Nearby has another text running across the bottom of each page continuously; the ebook version provides that text as an afterword. It’s a gesture toward expansiveness again, showing us the wide net Solnit wants to cast around form and content. In her acknowledgments at the end of the book Solnit includes a surprisingly awkward sentence, which may help explain the book’s complexities: “Failures are easy to come by, and making honey of them is harder, but I’ve tried with mine.” She may not succeed in “making honey” of all her raw material, but she is as interested in the process as the product. Despite its frustrations, this book provides a reading experience worth imagining.____Victoria Olsen teaches expository writing at New York University. Her most recent article for Open Letters Monthly was on Hannah Arendt.