A soulful, ambitious quest for a path through centuries of loss and displacement.
A brief collection of essays in search of solace in a time of global upheaval.
The “bright unbearable reality” of the title comes from a translation of the Greek word enargeia, which poet Alice Oswald uses to describe “when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.” Badkhen explores this idea in her preface, asking, “Why do we find it unbearable to acknowledge what truly is?” Via a series of ethereal scholarly essays, the author aims to find a better way to see and understand grief, especially as embodied in the world’s migrant crisis. Badkhen recounts her travels around the globe and bolsters her experiences with a dizzying wealth of literary and artistic touchstones. Hazily poetic, she constructs her essays like a collagist, in search of the untapped resonance that can be channeled when seemingly incongruous ideas are placed in proximity. In “Landscape With Icarus,” she presents facts about children seeking asylum next to vignettes about the Pied Piper, who, according to some legends, lured children into exodus. Badkhen later invokes Auden’s poem on Brueghel’s painting “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus,” a busy seaside scene in which Icarus is barely discernible, having crashed into the surf. “Where is the child, where is Icarus?” she asks. “Only the faint plunging legs twitch their last dance beneath the slim-crescent drift of feathers, and fingers grasp uselessly at a wave, and a vague splash forever rends your heart.” Another essay superimposes a trumpet player in the “pogromed neighborhood” of Greenwood, Tulsa, with tales of horns found in Tutankhamen’s tomb and the falling walls of Jericho. When these layers stack up, an ominous feeling creeps in: Could our contemporary traumas be simply the continuation of a millennia-old, ineffable trajectory? Perhaps, but Badkhen offers glimmers of hope: “Imagine the other ways in which the Anthropocene connects us: the polythreaded, shimmering veil of yearning and missing and care and love.”
A soulful, ambitious quest for a path through centuries of loss and displacement.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68137-706-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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