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Vista Del Mar: A Memoir of the Ordinary
This remarkable book joins the company of “self-work,” deep acts of memory that serve to illuminate the present by shining the clear light of careful regard on the past. The book finds company in the work of D J Waldie’s Holy Land , Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and the profound My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard.
In 1996 Neal Snidow found himself at a personal impasse as he and his wife struggled in vain to have a child. Locked in sadness at their predicament, in mid-career as a college teacher and unpublished writer, and at the first daunting steps of open adoption, as a kind of solace Neal began taking black and white photos of his old neighborhood in southern California. The film was slow, the camera on a tripod, the process awkward, and the goal no more than Garry Winogrand’s famous dictum that he made pictures “to find out what something will look like photographed.”
But as this process unfolded and the images began to accumulate, slowly but surely the pictures unlocked the past, and he began to delve into family history, opening out the secret and the unspoken and evoking the lost pleasures and losses of the beach town where he had grown up. The chapters that followed, like the photos that now accompanied them, were quietly observant of an ordinary surface around which gathered an aura of struggle, gaiety and loss. He titled the book Vista Del Mar, for the street that ran past his old apartment to the edge of the Pacific, and gave it the subtitle a memoir of the ordinary in testimony to the everydayness of the experiences he explored. The chapters move back and forth in time and place, to Virginia, to a homestead in Wyoming, to depression-era Nebraska, to the Second World War. Aunts, uncles, ancestors, beach denizens, characters of film noir, and finally a miraculous new baby, all populate the pages which despite the struggles they relate conclude on a major chord of reconciliation and hope.
In 1996 Neal Snidow found himself at a personal impasse as he and his wife struggled in vain to have a child. Locked in sadness at their predicament, in mid-career as a college teacher and unpublished writer, and at the first daunting steps of open adoption, as a kind of solace Neal began taking black and white photos of his old neighborhood in southern California. The film was slow, the camera on a tripod, the process awkward, and the goal no more than Garry Winogrand’s famous dictum that he made pictures “to find out what something will look like photographed.”
But as this process unfolded and the images began to accumulate, slowly but surely the pictures unlocked the past, and he began to delve into family history, opening out the secret and the unspoken and evoking the lost pleasures and losses of the beach town where he had grown up. The chapters that followed, like the photos that now accompanied them, were quietly observant of an ordinary surface around which gathered an aura of struggle, gaiety and loss. He titled the book Vista Del Mar, for the street that ran past his old apartment to the edge of the Pacific, and gave it the subtitle a memoir of the ordinary in testimony to the everydayness of the experiences he explored. The chapters move back and forth in time and place, to Virginia, to a homestead in Wyoming, to depression-era Nebraska, to the Second World War. Aunts, uncles, ancestors, beach denizens, characters of film noir, and finally a miraculous new baby, all populate the pages which despite the struggles they relate conclude on a major chord of reconciliation and hope.
224 pages, Paperback
First published May 10, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 17, 2016
Reading VISTA DEL MAR, A MEMOIR OF THE ORDINARY, the photographs that pepper the story like a comma in a sentence, that pause, and I smell the stucco of an apartment’s exterior, the hot sun on the broken wood slats of the fence.
We meet the characters. Aunt Nancy who “on her doctor’s advice shifted from her cork-tipped Herbert Tareytons to Kents with the medically approved Micronite filter” and we are in Mad Men or Didion. Aunt Nancy and her girlfriends with their “cut-glass dishes of bridge mix”, shantung sheaths, fur stoles and pearls when it’s a night out at Lawry’s The Prime Rib on La Cienega.
Just having met his future wife, the narrator imagines visiting her family home, a rush of comfort at the familiar, another family of apartment dwellers, pictures passing through their “hollow-core door with the letter D screwed into its veneer.”
Local landscape is perfectly recalled for anyone having grown up in this locale: “the dark unimproved miles of Playa del Ray, past the Hyperion Treatment Plant…the miles of Chevron tank farm, the rusted chain link fences thronged with ice plant….” and one, now vaguely reminded of D. J. Waldie’s HOLY LAND, wonders if it’s shame or embarrassment or wonder that one is feeling or should feel.
But there’s no direction to that question here, this memoir notably free of judgment, of the didactic. It’s not instructional, thank goodness, as mute as the “bedspread’s nubby chenille.”
Occasionally turned up to almost operatic proportion, as in Chapter 6, where we’re taken through the Father’s strong culinary background, the magnificent passage through chickens fricasseed, fried, roasted, stewed with dumplings, the Parker House rolls, to the Father’s adjustment in southern California suburban cooking and then circling back to his roots, cooking on special occasions or for company the Virginia country ham “reluctantly, parsimoniously, worshipfully parceled out on biscuits to be choked down in silence like grief itself…”
Chapter 7, a particular account of WWII that moves from Primo Levi to “ Going My Way.” Not a catalogue but like a dream in which the narrator, hearing family stories, “dreamed on.”
Religious language, barely detectable here: the “Gnosticism of ring binders”, the Father’s cooking as “sacramental”, a comparison to icons, a glance at the sparrows in Chapter 10 of Matthew’s Gospel, and I am reminded of Giotto’s “St. Francis Preaching to the Birds.” Hundreds of details, all “ordinary” but held in a vague spirit of gratitude, to the last page, where Snidow shows the carefully knotted net to which he feels the book’s existence, as a book, is in debt. These particular persons, this implacable charm of ordinary things. This charm that moves toward something graced.
We meet the characters. Aunt Nancy who “on her doctor’s advice shifted from her cork-tipped Herbert Tareytons to Kents with the medically approved Micronite filter” and we are in Mad Men or Didion. Aunt Nancy and her girlfriends with their “cut-glass dishes of bridge mix”, shantung sheaths, fur stoles and pearls when it’s a night out at Lawry’s The Prime Rib on La Cienega.
Just having met his future wife, the narrator imagines visiting her family home, a rush of comfort at the familiar, another family of apartment dwellers, pictures passing through their “hollow-core door with the letter D screwed into its veneer.”
Local landscape is perfectly recalled for anyone having grown up in this locale: “the dark unimproved miles of Playa del Ray, past the Hyperion Treatment Plant…the miles of Chevron tank farm, the rusted chain link fences thronged with ice plant….” and one, now vaguely reminded of D. J. Waldie’s HOLY LAND, wonders if it’s shame or embarrassment or wonder that one is feeling or should feel.
But there’s no direction to that question here, this memoir notably free of judgment, of the didactic. It’s not instructional, thank goodness, as mute as the “bedspread’s nubby chenille.”
Occasionally turned up to almost operatic proportion, as in Chapter 6, where we’re taken through the Father’s strong culinary background, the magnificent passage through chickens fricasseed, fried, roasted, stewed with dumplings, the Parker House rolls, to the Father’s adjustment in southern California suburban cooking and then circling back to his roots, cooking on special occasions or for company the Virginia country ham “reluctantly, parsimoniously, worshipfully parceled out on biscuits to be choked down in silence like grief itself…”
Chapter 7, a particular account of WWII that moves from Primo Levi to “ Going My Way.” Not a catalogue but like a dream in which the narrator, hearing family stories, “dreamed on.”
Religious language, barely detectable here: the “Gnosticism of ring binders”, the Father’s cooking as “sacramental”, a comparison to icons, a glance at the sparrows in Chapter 10 of Matthew’s Gospel, and I am reminded of Giotto’s “St. Francis Preaching to the Birds.” Hundreds of details, all “ordinary” but held in a vague spirit of gratitude, to the last page, where Snidow shows the carefully knotted net to which he feels the book’s existence, as a book, is in debt. These particular persons, this implacable charm of ordinary things. This charm that moves toward something graced.
August 13, 2016
The author asks a lot of his reader and gives much in return as he offers glimpses of his life and the lives of his mother, father, and other family members. His language is poetic and evocative; accompanying photographs strike a lonely note. It's a beautiful book, though occasionally a trying one - lots of gaps between those glimpses.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews