Faraway Nearby

"We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or hate, to see or to be blind. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning."

Rebecca Solnit

The Faraway Nearby

After reading so many stories in such a short period of time, I've started to wonder how all of those different stories were affecting me. Or how any story can affect anybody. It is something that we sometimes talk about. How this book was meaningful, how that story changed a persons life, how Harry Potter has been scientifically shown to make children more tolerant, and how the Bible is supposed to make people more morally aware. It's an unspoken truth that books and stories affect our behavior, our outlook on life. People have been trying to manipulate others through censorship for a very long time because of that idea. 

Rebecca Solnit, in The Faraway Nearby, delves into these ideas behind stories by telling us the one where her mother begins to loose her memory and function, and she deals with her own sickness and change. She deconstructs Frankenstein, digs into the familiar patterns behind myth and fairytale, and examines the lives of others (Che Guevera in his travels among those afflicted by leperosy, a blues musician, an arctic cannibal, and an Icelandic artist) in order to make sense of her own story. Written like a set of essays beautifully arranged in book format, her language is powerful and her prose beautiful.

I really enjoyed this book. I loved how everything was linked together and everything was connected. I loved how she demonstrated how the meaning of stories can change so much with the slightest changes in detail. She talked about this idea explicitly with retelling's of the story of the woman caught in a snowstorm, and also did it, much more subtly, with here deconstructions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, first using the story as a way to discuss the way she thinks her mother often felt about her, then the global changes in weather and how we are unconsciously, and often unknowingly affecting the arctic, and, towards the end, how she sometimes feels writing books and telling stories, how they often take on a life of their own that is directed by the reader. I loved these deconstructions.

Another thing that I really enjoyed in this book was how she examined fairy tales and the changes that were made in the stories as the settings changed. How Cupid and Psyche became Beauty and the Beast, which then became East of the Sun, West of the Moon. I love this story. I love how it breaks down the barriers between the species to something as simple as day and night, how the nature of a relationship can change on the setting. East was one of my favorite books growing up, and it was wonderful to see the story deconstructed.

I highly recommend this book. I highly recommend anything by Rebecca Solnit. Her articles are wonderful, and her other books (Men Explain Things to Me, Paradise Built in Hell) are spectacular.