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Format | Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... South Regional Library | 809.8928 Hil | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Beginning with a Best American award-winning narrative, Kathleen Hill's memoir explores defining moments of a life illuminated by novels, read in Nigeria and France and at home in New York. As a child in a music class where a remarkable teacher watches over a classmate marked for tragedy, the author by chance reads Willa Cather's novel, Lucy Gayheart , and is prepared against her will for death by drowning. And prepared for the teacher's confessions to the class of a frustrated ambition to become a pianist, her regret for a life that will never be. Later, recently married and living in a newly independent Nigeria, a teacher now herself, the author gives Achebe's Things Fall Apart to her students and is instructed by them in the violent legacy of colonialism. And loses her American innocence when she visits a nearby abandoned slave port and connects its rusting shackles with the students sitting before her. Reading A Portrait of a Lady , also in Nigeria, she ponders her own new marriage through the lens of Isabel Archer's cautionary fate, remembers her own adolescent fear that reading might be a way of avoiding experience. A few years later, this time in a town in northern France, haunted by Madame Bovary , by Emma's solitude and boredom, she puts aside Flaubert's novel and discovers in Bernanos' Diary of a Country Priest the poverty and suffering she had failed to see all around her. The memoir closes with a tender account of the author's friendship with the writer, Diana Trilling, whose failing sight inspires a plan to read aloud Proust's masterwork, an undertaking that takes six years to complete. Faced with Diana's approaching death and the mysteries of her own life, the author wonders whether reading after all may not be experience at its most ardent, its most transforming.
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
A distinguished fiction writer traces the relationship between significant periods in her life and the novels she was reading during those defining times.From the time she was a child, Hill (MFA Program/Sarah Lawrence Coll. Who Occupies This House, 2010, etc.) had a sense that events unfolding around her were "inside a story." The first time she experienced the way life and art mirrored each other was in a seventh-grade music class. Around the time her teacher told students about the accident that ended her career as a concert pianist, Hill immersed herself in Willa Cather's Lucy Gayheart. The heroine's accidental drowning prepared the author for the death of a friend's father, who committed suicide by jumping into the town reservoir. When she was 23, she traveled to Nigeria with her husband to teach. There, she encountered Things Fall Apart and learned about Nigeria's racist colonial history, all without fully realizing how deeply implicated her own "right-thinking" country was in that brutal past. Reading A Portrait of a Lady cast her own innocence, both about colonial Africa and her own rushed union with her husband, into uncomfortable relief: like slavery, "marriage involved...the desireto bend another's will to the requirements of one's own." On a later trip to France, the author was drawn to Madame Bovary and the female protagonist who believed that reality "hover[ed] just beyond reach"; and then to Diary of a Country Priest, which offered her insight into how she had been looking at the people around her "through the lens of fear" rather than love. But it would be la Recherche du Temps Perdu, which she read many years later to a nearly blind Diana Trilling, that would cause her to think more deeply about the mysteries of life. Eloquent and searching, Hill's book explores the strange and wondrous resonances between the read and lived while celebrating reading itself as among the most profoundly transformative of human acts. A thought-provoking memoir about the significance of literature in life. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.