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Possibility: Essays Against Despair attempts to translate some of life's disordered events into the orderly happiness of art. The book includes encounters with manatees, children, and snakes; with Henry Adams, Marcel Proust, and W.G. Sebald ; with Texas landscape, Vertigo, and Vermeer. Adams, in Japan after his wife's death, found in the elaborate ritual of the tea ceremony and in the discomforts of a rural inn, occasions for the wit to face down grief. His letters to friends coax laughter from strangeness and loss. Like Adams, Vigderman has a stylist's passion for revelatory detail, and for the pleasure of immersion in a world. Smart, generous, and probing, her discoveries play with direct experience, exploring the interaction of life and art as "magic you can walk in and out of."
"Vigderman specializes in elliptical, epigrammatic insight that makes connectiosn that readers might not otherwise perceive.... Perhaps the most provocative essay and the emotional centerpiece is "My Depressed Person (A Monologue)," which interweaves a critical assessment of David Foster Wallace's short story "The Depressed Person" with Vigderman's own experience dealing with the depression of someone close to her, and perhaps her own as well."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Vigderman specializes in elliptical, epigrammatic insight that makes connectiosn that readers might not otherwise perceive.... Perhaps the most provocative essay and the emotional centerpiece is "My Depressed Person (A Monologue)," which interweaves a critical assessment of David Foster Wallace's short story "The Depressed Person" with Vigderman's own experience dealing with the depression of someone close to her, and perhaps her own as well."
--Kirkus Reviews
Price: $15.95
Pages: 184
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Imprint: Sarabande Books
Publication Date:
02 April 2013
Trim Size: 7.75 X 5.25 in
ISBN: 9781936747542
Format: Paperback
"Though the book's title might resemble that of a self-help book, the essays in Vigderman's collection dwell not on despair, but on the project of translating chaotic experience into art or memory.... She is enthusiastic about beautiful language and new words--and her writing, lyrical and graceful, shows it."
--Publishers Weekly
"Vigderman specializes in elliptical, epigrammatic insight that makes connections that readers might not otherwise perceive. Most of the essays (many of them little longer than a page or two) were published independently, and all can stand on their own, but the author has provided a conceptual framework and thread of continuity as she groups them into four parts, moving from “Internal Conversations” to “The Measure of Grief ” in the opening and two most compelling sections.... Frequent illumination within the density of compression, as the writer challenges readers to determine what they’re thinking and feeling about what she’s thinking and feeling."
--Kirkus Reviews
--Publishers Weekly
"Vigderman specializes in elliptical, epigrammatic insight that makes connections that readers might not otherwise perceive. Most of the essays (many of them little longer than a page or two) were published independently, and all can stand on their own, but the author has provided a conceptual framework and thread of continuity as she groups them into four parts, moving from “Internal Conversations” to “The Measure of Grief ” in the opening and two most compelling sections.... Frequent illumination within the density of compression, as the writer challenges readers to determine what they’re thinking and feeling about what she’s thinking and feeling."
--Kirkus Reviews
Patricia Vigderman is the author of The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner (Sarabande Books, 2007), bringing the world of a century-old Boston museum and its eccentric founder into harmony with present reality. Other efforts to reconcile life’s discordant notes have led her to the ruined monuments of antiquity and its beautiful salvaged remnants, to an unexpected love affair with film, and into the endlessly unfolding mysteries of nature, language, art, and love. In 2010 she was a Literature Fellow at the Liguria Center for the Arts and Humanities in Bogliasco, Italy. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Gambier, Ohio, where she teaches in the English department at Kenyon College.
Possibility: Essays Against Despair
Introduction: Seeing Double . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I: Internal Conversations
1. The Task of the Translator . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2. A Writer’s Harvest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3. Sebald in Starbucks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4. Eye Shadows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5. Monkey Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6. Henry Adams in Japan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
II: The Measure of Grief
7. Genealogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
8. Dixie Diary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
9. The Other Side . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
10. My Depressed Person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
11. Not Exactly Kaddish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
12. Grace Paley Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
III: At Liberty
13. Eggs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
14. Tapping Back . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
15. What It’s Like in Ohio . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
16. Manatees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
17. By the Pond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
18. Oxherding in the Chisos Mountains . . . . . . . . .
IV: Particular Artifice
19. Boxes in Texas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
20. Inventing Cinema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
21. Possibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Introduction: Seeing Double . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I: Internal Conversations
1. The Task of the Translator . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2. A Writer’s Harvest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3. Sebald in Starbucks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4. Eye Shadows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5. Monkey Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6. Henry Adams in Japan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
II: The Measure of Grief
7. Genealogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
8. Dixie Diary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
9. The Other Side . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
10. My Depressed Person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
11. Not Exactly Kaddish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
12. Grace Paley Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
III: At Liberty
13. Eggs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
14. Tapping Back . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
15. What It’s Like in Ohio . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
16. Manatees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
17. By the Pond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
18. Oxherding in the Chisos Mountains . . . . . . . . .
IV: Particular Artifice
19. Boxes in Texas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
20. Inventing Cinema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
21. Possibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .