Possibility: Essays Against Despair

by Patricia Vigderman

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

Genres: Essays

184 pages, Paperback

First published March 22, 2013

Reviews

[Patricia]

I never do read every essay in a collection and not all of these grabbed me. Still, a couple of these had real staying power. Henry Adams in Japan and "My Depressed Person" were perceptive and compassionate and resilient.

[Sarahc Caflisch]

A beautifully designed book. Some wonderful essays and some good essays and some essays I skipped altogether.

[Jaime]

I liked the middle section best, the section on grief; maybe just because of where I am right now. The rest....I could take or leave.