Woman Zone CT
  • Home
  • About
    • Vision
    • The WZ Team
    • Background
    • Projects >
      • Artscape Womens Humanity Walk
      • The Everywoman Project
      • Women's Walks
  • The Women's Library
  • Book Club
    • About
    • Book Reviews
  • Podcast
  • Blog
  • Contact
WELCOME TO THE WOMAN ZONE BOOK REVIEW PAGE.                   
​This is where members of the WZ Book Club get to share their thoughts on titles seen on the shelves of our Women’s Library. All reviews are unsolicited and only those attending the WZBC may borrow and review books.
The Woman Zone Book Club meets on the 2nd Saturday of every month between 2pm and 4pm at The Women’s Library, ground floor, Artscape.  All are welcome.
​
We welcome your reviews of women-authored books. Send between 200-500 words and cover pic if possible to info@womanzonect.co.za or hipzone@mweb and we will post it here! 

The Faraway Nearby

8/16/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Granta
Reviewer: Nadia Kamies 
I knew before I came to the end of this book that it would be one of those that I would reread and treasure. Solnit weaves together diverse threads of her own love, life and loss, with fairytales, travel and stories about explorers, revolutionaries and writers, like Mary Shelley, Che Guevarra and the Marquis de Sade.
One summer she receives three boxes of apricots from her mother’s tree, from the home she used to live in. As her mother descends into Alzheimer’s her life is slowly 
​unravelling – she becomes more and more confused, gets lost, locks herself out of her house – and Solnit and her brothers have to pack their mother up and move her into a seniors’ home. The apricots become a metaphor that runs throughout the book – for abundance but also for a kind of inheritance from her mother that she has to sift through, discard what is rotten, or bottle, can and preserve.
Alongside the apricots, is a trip to Iceland that she goes on as she learnt as a young woman, “never to turn down an adventure without a really good reason” and the story takes off in another direction.
Ultimately, this is a book about writing and storytelling. “Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them”, she says, and to be without a story is to be well and truly lost. We ourselves are stories and in the strongest stories we see ourselves and our connection to others through story and empathy, she adds. Ironically, her mother is losing the stories that she lived by and it changes their relationship that was always fraught with difficulties.
Solnit writes with empathy and compassion about her relationship with her mother. The book is both deeply personal and philosophical. I was interested to see the book is classified as memoir/anti-memoir. An anti-memoir is less about the author and more about the reader and this book resonated with me on many levels.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Write something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview.

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • About
    • Vision
    • The WZ Team
    • Background
    • Projects >
      • Artscape Womens Humanity Walk
      • The Everywoman Project
      • Women's Walks
  • The Women's Library
  • Book Club
    • About
    • Book Reviews
  • Podcast
  • Blog
  • Contact