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1 of 1 copy available
Essays about migration, displacement, and the hope for connection in a time of emotional and geopolitical disruption by a Soviet-born writer and former war correspondent.
Called a “chronicler of a world on the move” by The New York Review of Books, Anna Badkhen seeks what separates and binds us at a time when one in seven people has left their birthplace, while a pandemic dictates the direst season of rupture in humankind’s remembering. Her new essay collection, Bright Unbearable Reality, comprises eleven essays set on four continents—roving everywhere from Oklahoma to Azerbaijan—and united by a common thread of communion and longing.
In these essays, Badkhen addresses the human condition in the era of such unprecedented dislocation, contemplates the roles of memory and wonder in how we relate to one another, and asks how we can soberly and responsibly counter despair and continue to develop—or at least imagine—an emotional vocabulary against depravity.
The subject throughout the collection is bright unbearable reality itself, a translation of Greek enargeia, which, says the poet Alice Oswald, is “when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.”
Essays include:
• In “The Pandemic, Our Common Story,” which takes place in the Great Rift Valley of Ethiopia, one of the locations where humankind originated, the onset of the global pandemic catches Badkhen mid-journey, researching human dispersal 160,000 years ago and migration in modern times.
• In “How to Read the Air,” set mostly in Philadelphia, Badkhen looks to the ancient Greeks for help pondering our need for certainty at a time of racist violence, political upheaval, and environmental cataclysm.
• “Ways of Seeing” and the title essay “Bright Unbearable Reality” wrestle with complications of distance and specifically the bird’s eye view—the relationship between physical distance, understanding, and engagement.
• “Landscape with Icarus” examines how and why children go missing, while “Dark Matter” explores how violence always takes us by surprise.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 18, 2022 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781681377070
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781681377070
- File size: 413 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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August 15, 2022
A brief collection of essays in search of solace in a time of global upheaval. The "bright unbearable reality" of the title comes from a translation of the Greek word enargeia, which poet Alice Oswald uses to describe "when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves." Badkhen explores this idea in her preface, asking, "Why do we find it unbearable to acknowledge what truly is?" Via a series of ethereal scholarly essays, the author aims to find a better way to see and understand grief, especially as embodied in the world's migrant crisis. Badkhen recounts her travels around the globe and bolsters her experiences with a dizzying wealth of literary and artistic touchstones. Hazily poetic, she constructs her essays like a collagist, in search of the untapped resonance that can be channeled when seemingly incongruous ideas are placed in proximity. In "Landscape With Icarus," she presents facts about children seeking asylum next to vignettes about the Pied Piper, who, according to some legends, lured children into exodus. Badkhen later invokes Auden's poem on Brueghel's painting "Landscape With the Fall of Icarus," a busy seaside scene in which Icarus is barely discernible, having crashed into the surf. "Where is the child, where is Icarus?" she asks. "Only the faint plunging legs twitch their last dance beneath the slim-crescent drift of feathers, and fingers grasp uselessly at a wave, and a vague splash forever rends your heart." Another essay superimposes a trumpet player in the "pogromed neighborhood" of Greenwood, Tulsa, with tales of horns found in Tutankhamen's tomb and the falling walls of Jericho. When these layers stack up, an ominous feeling creeps in: Could our contemporary traumas be simply the continuation of a millennia-old, ineffable trajectory? Perhaps, but Badkhen offers glimmers of hope: "Imagine the other ways in which the Anthropocene connects us: the polythreaded, shimmering veil of yearning and missing and care and love." A soulful, ambitious quest for a path through centuries of loss and displacement.COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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