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Title: The Faraway Nearby

Author: Rebecca Solnit

Narrator: Rebecca Solnit

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins

Language: English

Release date: 01-13-15

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Gifts come in many guises. One summer, Rebecca Solnit was bequeathed three boxes of ripening apricots, which lay, mountainous, on her bedroom floor - a windfall, a riddle, an emergency to be dealt with. The fruit came from a neglected tree that her mother, gradually succumbing to memory loss, could no longer tend to. From this unexpected inheritance came stories spun like those of Scheherazade, who used her gifts as a storyteller to change her fate and her listener's heart.

As she looks back on the year of apricots and emergencies, Solnit weaves her own story into fairytales and the lives of others - the Marquis de Sade, Mary Shelley and Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. She tells of unexpected invitations and adventures, from a library of water in Iceland to the depths of the Grand Canyon. She tells of doctors and explorers, monsters and moths. She tells of warmth and coldness, of making art and re-making the self.

Members Reviews:

Great book of essays, disappointing as a memoir.

I'm a big fan of RS's essays and well aware she can write circles around most people. I found this book disappointing in that it felt like she used three traumatic events (her mother's descent into Alzheimers, her own preventative breast surgery, and the end of a long relationship) as a jumping off point for very learned and engaging, but quite impersonal, essays. She strikes me as someone who would welcome you into her house with the warmest of smiles, but then use stories in the most beguiling of ways, to keep you at a good, safe emotional distance.

It's beautiful, it's not an easy read

Her writing is invitational. Unlike some who tell their stories as if their lives are linear, Solnit's story says "pay attention- this is how life is for me". I suppose it may not ask for us to pay attention as a teacher would demand of her students, but more gently, as a lover would say to her beloved. It's beautiful, it's not an easy read, but it's so wroth reading.

I get to enjoy the review from each of them who write to ...

Not only is this on my list of "all-time favorite" books, I have bought this for 7(!!) of my friends and mailed it all out to them in the last few months. Now, I get to enjoy the review from each of them who write to exclaim - and these are all well-read and picky about their literature...this book is beyond expression for me. I keep picking it back up and diving in. So delighted to have discovered it and been able to share it.

Beautifully written, but lacking in detail

While this is a lyrical and unique book- half memoir, half literary/cultural criticism - I did not connect with much of the author's issues related to her mother, or former boyfriend, or friend in crisis, or her own disease. This is because she is far too vague and lacking in any chunk of specifics in order to properly identify with her.

Passages regarding her travels also seem out of sorts with an otherwise cohesive work, compounding and building with each new piece of her puzzle, whether it is a historical figure, a work of art, or extended metaphor that is artfully carried well beyond its assumed shelf life.

Rebecca Solnit doesn't disappoint. An excellent book that examines the author's relationship ...

Rebecca Solnit doesn't disappoint.