Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography Through Essays

by Claire Messud

'A profound book about the intrication of literature and life, about the modest, miraculous ways art helps us to live' Garth Greenwell

'I can think of few writers capable of such thrilling seriousness expressed with so lavish a gift' Rachel Cusk, Evening Standard

In her fiction, Claire Messud 'has specialised in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives' (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine ). Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud's own a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and literature.

In twenty-nine intimate, brilliant and funny essays, Messud reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia; the complex relationship between her modern Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt; and a trip to Beirut, where her pied-noir father had once lived, while he was dying. She meditates on contemporary classics from Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk and Valeria Luiselli; examines three facets of Albert Camus and The Stranger ; and tours her favorite paintings at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. In the luminous title essay, she explores her drive to write, born of the magic of sharing language and the transformative powers of 'a single successful sentence'.

Together, these essays show the inner workings of a dazzling literary mind. Crafting a vivid portrait of a life in celebration of the power of literature, Messud proves once again 'an absolute master storyteller' (Rebecca Carroll, Los Angeles Times ).

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Memoir, Writing, Biography Memoir, Biography, Literary Criticism

Hardcover

First published October 13, 2020

About the author

Claire Messud is an American novelist and literature and creative writing professor. She is best known as the author of the novel The Emperor's Children (2006).

Reviews

[Diane Barnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the first half of this book when she writes of her grandparents and parents and rather unusual childhood. But the book reviews and art criticisms were a little too intellectual for me, and didn't hold my interest at all. Certainly not her fault, but mine. I have really liked her fiction in the past, and you have to admit this is a great title.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Very thought-provoking essays from the transcendent to the very personal (dogs).

[Noreen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Claire Messud’s novels, but I don’t think she is given enough credit for what a wonderful critic and essayist she is. The pieces in this volume are insightful, thought-provoking and beautifully written.

[Noah Sanders]

First third of this book is great. Really beautifully essays about Messud’s life. The second two-third is her academic yarns on various authors and artists. Some great writing but overall a little dry.

[Abhinav · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why write? Because it honours our memories. And that death comes too soon, even without warning. Writing is what counters death. Write letters to the ones you care for. Remember the past, put in writing, take photographs - film preferably.

Messud gently guides the reader into the deepest memories of her past, acquainting the reader with her parents, children, and pets. This book is a beautiful journey into a very thoughtful person's life, and as such it's stories are embroidered with metaphor and meaning. Messud deals with themes such as childhood, death, purpose, and legacy, often eliciting sensitive emotions.

Personally, I only read her autobiographical essays and her more philosophically rich essays. Her essays on text and image I found to be uninteresting.

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I give five stars to the autobiographical essays that make up the first part of this volume. I could have read a thousand more pages of Messud’s personal stories spanning generations, countries, and all sorts of privileged, worldly experience. And more stories about her dogs! It was the autobiographical essays that made me curious to learn which books Messud loves and that’s what I took from the second part of the book—I took the “which” but, surprising to me, couldn’t bring myself to care at all about the “whys” she presents in her criticism. Same with with art criticism—I found very little convincing, even for artists like Sally Mann about whom I know a passing amount.

[Carey Calvert · Rating 5 out of 5]

... after having feasted on Alexander Chee's fabulous How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, I've been fascinated with the genre. Of Chee, I wrote, "a beautifully written sonnet."

Kant's Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write, is too, yet with a philosophical bent, Kant notwithstanding.

The title derives from Thomas Bernhard's novel, The Loser, "... we study a monumental work, for example Kant's work, and in time it shrivels down to Kant's little East Prussian head and to a thoroughly amorphous world of night and fog, which winds up in the same state of helplessness as all the others ..."

The point is that "Our great philosophers ... shrivel down to a single successful sentence ... often we remember only a so-called philosophical hue."

Yet, Claire Messud, best-selling author of The Emperor's Children, and The Burning Girl, avoids this trap; as a writer, she has "staked her life on the possibility of the original expression of authentic experience."

Part One, Reflections, delves into Messud's personal history; particularly moving, is the chapter, Two Women (her mother and aunt), whose identities "involved profound self-loathing: they believed, as so many women have been brought up to believe that they were inadequate as they were."

Part Two, Criticism: Books, gives us a chance to marvel at not only Messud's writing and perspective, but the authors of whom she writes, also share a connection in her development and maturation. Messud explores the works of Camus (Messud's father also attended the Lycee Bugeaud, where Jaques Derrida was a classmate: ("I always did better than him in philosophy," her father said), Kamel Daoud, who wrote The Mersault Investigation, a response to Camus' The Stranger, and among others, Jane Bowles (Two Serious Ladies), and Saul Friedlander (When Memory Comes).

But I was so taken with Messud's analysis of the authors, Yasmine El Rashida (Chronicle of a Last Summer) and Valeria Luiselli (Lost Children Archive), that I ordered a work from both.

I did the same for Sally Mann, whom Messud describes "... who knew that she could as easily have been a writer as a photographer?"

Mann's work, Hold Still, is featured in Part Three, Images, which also includes the work of Alice Neel and Marlene Dumas.

"I am who I am because I was where I was, when I was; and almost all of it is invisible to the world." Although Messud admits this is true for all of us, quoting T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, she explains further, "We are as much the sum of our lived literary experiences as our literally lived experiences ...

These are the fragments I have shored against my ruins."

[Arti · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've appreciated Claire Messud the memoirist and critic much more than Messud the fiction writer, although I admit I've read only two of her novels, The Burning Girl and The Woman Upstairs. The first part of this autobiography in essays reveals her multicultural roots and the various geographical locales that had made up who she is as a writer. A French father born in colonial Algeria and a Canadian mother, what an interesting fusion of culture. She writes about her growing up years moving from Connecticut to Australia to Canada and back to the States, later her travel to Beirut, an emotionally torn, love trip both for her dying father who had lived there with fond memories, and for herself... Messud is generous in sharing the intimacies of her familial relationships. I've found too that certain parts of her novels are based on real life experiences and encounters, e.g. the character in The Burning Girl.

The second part is both taxing and satisfying as she critiques on various writers and artists. Even though some I haven't read or even heard of, I find the essays astute, thoughtful, and exemplary in critique writing. The Camus essays are particularly enlightening in terms of the political situations of French Algiers and the issues of colonization and post-colonial dilemmas.

The Sally Mann essay is also mesmerizing, in an interview she'd said, "unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art... it's always been my philosophy to make art out of the everyday, the ordinary." Herein lies the dilemma of privacy and art making as Mann had photographed her children naked and husband who is stricken with muscular dystrophy. Thus making her a highly controversial artist. Anyway, herein lies the dilemma of a memoirist, I suppose, like Messud's book, the revealing of relational intimacy and private thoughts and the crafting of an authentic autobiography.

One more thing I've found when reading this book... here's an example of a principle of reading I've held onto, not just for reading but say, watching movies as well, and that's I don't have to agree with everything to which the author subscribes and yet still appreciate her thoughts and enjoy her writing.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely wonderful collection of essays by one of the finest writers of this age. She discusses personal experience as a writer, reader, descendant, and woman. This is also a chronicle of criticism of some of her favorite authors and artists, introducing me to a wide range of unexplored books that are now in my To Be Read list. I was lucky enough to meet Claire Messud at a book festival and I wish everyone would read her amazing work. 5 stars.

[Maura · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Right from the beginning, I found Ms. Messud to be affected and attempting to sound superior. But when she decided to become political about ..'.this so-called President'.... I was done. Does she not realize that half of her readers may be of an opposing political viewpoint? Was she intending to be a mean girl or just naturally condescending? Doesn't matter to me. There are many an author I have not yet met and I shall spend my time enjoying old favorites and finding new ones, but I am done with Ms. Self-absorbed Clair.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this compilation of short stories and artistic criticisms Messud shows herself in a way many artists do not, at least as expressly— through her own life story. She seems an existentialist, and a contented one at that. But that should not be a surprise. For contrary to conventional belief, existentialists must seek meaning (contentment) in the midst of a chaotic, absurd universe, in their own minds and in the action they take in their own lives. No one succeeds entirely, but Messud appears to have done so more than many.

[Bookreporter.com Biography & Memoir · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Claire Messud’s literary universe, as in her eclectic and moveable life, the things most worth reflecting on come in layers that simultaneously connect the mundane, the exotic and the humbly memorable.

Even the title of this richly drawn anthology of more than two dozen essays, KANT’S LITTLE PRUSSIAN HEAD AND OTHER REASONS WHY I WRITE, speaks to the dry wit and arresting spontaneity that permeate her very personal reflections on life, great authors of the past and present, and art in various forms. Although at the peak of her creative power, Messud also seems to be casting an experienced retrospective eye over several decades of critically acclaimed writing.

Drawn from Thomas Bernhard’s novel, THE LOSER, the opening title phrase is recalled by Bernhard’s fictitious narrator as something that the eccentric genius, Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, might have said (but probably didn’t). And in a context that opens with her multitasking career woman’s sense of vertigo at having watched an unnamed television science documentary about the vastness of the universe, the reader can take various meanings from the wry diminution of a philosophical giant.

But in essence, greatness of all kinds can come in a surprising array of sizes and levels of appreciation, and that already elevates Messud’s attention-grabbing title into a less affected and more human dimension.

The same could be said for her concentrated and vibrant prose throughout KANT’S LITTLE PRUSSIAN HEAD. Every page exudes her quiet yet compelling joy in the power of well-nourished language, a vast vocabulary treated with the awe and reverence that a great painter treats the endless potentialities of color or a composer the myriad combinations of notes in a score. Where arrogance will throw words, colors or sounds onto the page in clever combinations, mindful greatness will patiently blend and mold them into uniquely memorable sensory and emotional experiences.

Messud could easily and successfully have collected or composed all of her essays in the autobiographical vein but stretches the promise of the book’s subtitle by dividing her anthology into three unequal parts. Whether or not they should have been three separate books is difficult to decide, as they all express aspects of her own character as well as that of the individuals enlarged by her acute observations.

“Reflections” (Part One) contains nearly a dozen essays spanning a non-chronological array of personal memories and reflections about her multinational upbringing, a close and unusual family, and cultural experiences and events that influenced both her parental and professional life.

“Criticism: Books” (Part Two) includes a trio of outstanding reflections on the iconic French Algerian author Albert Camus, followed by insightful and deeply relevant reviews of a group of authors too many of us have heard of and too few have read (to our loss) --- among them, Kazuo Ishiguro, Italo Svevo, Rachel Cusk, Saul Friedlander and Valeria Luiselli.

Finally, “Criticism: Images” (Part Three), is devoted to writer-photographer Sally Mann and painters Alice Neel and Darlene Dumas. Here, one can fervently wish that Messud had selected a few more deserving female artists, in any medium. None of these thoughtful but diligent essays reads like an add-on, but after just three, there is a hunger for more of her same-yet-different appraisals of gifted talents who have made a significant difference in how we perceive the world.

By far the most emotionally captivating segments of KANT’S LITTLE PRUSSIAN HEAD are Messud’s skillfully selected, one might almost say, curated reminiscences of growing up and maturing in Australia, Canada, the United States and Britain; retracing her French-Algerian father’s fragmented history back to Beirut; and unraveling convoluted family ties that included her Canadian mother’s suppressed intellectual aspirations and her father’s self-destructive sister whose needs intruded on the marriage.

Once Messud and her British husband became parents themselves, they raised their children in a much less volatile environment, which often gives her pause to reflect on how memories shape our personal and collective histories, as well as helping us to create a more meaningful present.

In that vein, one of Messud’s most memorable pieces of writing in KANT’S LITTLE PRUSSIAN HEAD is, somewhat ironically, her Introduction. The book went to press just as the first wave of COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic by the UN World Health Organization.

The vast impact of the virus was as yet unknown, and the ferocious run-up to a historic presidential election earlier this month was just beginning to expose widening divisions across all of America as the rest of the world waited with bated breath for the outcome. In a few short but powerful pages, Messud brilliantly captures the hopes, fears, challenges and changes we faced then and continue to face now.

She also reinforces for everyone the importance of making and experiencing art. Now, more than ever, we need to set aside our screens and connect with meaning through the printed word.

Reviewed by Pauline Finch

[Peter Allum · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection of essays will be welcome to those who admire Messud's novels. In the opening essays, Messud describes her family background (pied noir Algerian on her father's side, Canadian Catholic on her mother's). Messud led a peripatetic youth (Australia, Canada, USA) and describes how she found stability and solace in reading. She also recounts key influences from her childhood--her strong-willed mother, her often absent father, and her father's sister, neurotic, unmarried, and routinely at war with Messud's mother. This opening section of the collection works well and Messud uses her family background to inform her literary reviews--for example, drawing on her father's Algerian origins for three essays on Camus.

I also appreciated the collection because Messud has reviewed artists for whom I share an enthusiasm (Magda Szabo, Italo Svevo, Teju Cole, Albert Camus, Alice Neel, Sally Mann). I have put Jane Bowles' Two Serious Women on my reading list, based on Messud's review (I loved Paul Bowles' Sheltering Sky and didn't know his wife was also an author).

A few reservations to the collection led to my overall low rating (I'd toyed with a three, but in the end decided that, for me, it was just an "OK" read).

Messud tends to write with long, multi-clause sentences that introduce an idea, pick up a tangentially-related topic, expand on it, and then circle back to the original theme. The diversion is often interesting, but tends to leave the reader a little lost in making a link between the head and tail of the sentence. For example, the following sentence diverts twice into parenthetical observations, and I was initially lost as to the origins of the concluding two words:

"My mother, although diminished (as yet undiagnosed, she was already undermined by the Lewy body dementia that would fell her), resisted valiantly, because my father (at that time off with the fairies, as the expression has it; apt for the fairy-tale-like nature of that time) could not."

At times, the affecting details of Messud's essays about her family are undermined by an apparent reach for analytical seriousness. The following sentence refers to the psychological difficulties experienced by Messud's aunt:

"A lyrical or mythic narrative of what resulted, for lonely young Denise, might glancingly propose that the violence and distress of the nation--France's inability to maintain power over its colony, Algeria, while at the same time being unable to liberate it--manifested as a crisis in my aunt's psyche, she a young woman who could neither be free from her abandoned homeland (whence her parents also had departed, of course, first for Morocco and then Argentina) nor at home in metropolitan France."

Sometimes, Messud seems to write for a tiny percentage of the population which, like her, reads insatiably and subscribes to multiple literary magazines. Introducing an essay on Kazuo Ishiguro she asks, "Who hasn't found delight in rereading Pride and Prejudice or in a production of The Tempest?" Umm, maybe 99% of the population...

The tendency to name drop is strong throughout. Perhaps because Messud enjoys identifying and sharing literary parallels, or because she feels that her ideas are stronger when buttressed with quotes from great artists? The rather clumsy title of the collection is a case in point. 100 points for the reference to Kant. However, even reading the essay from which the title is taken, the non-specialist reader remains in the dark. The reference comes from a novel by Thomas Bernhard in which he suggests that we retain only a small fraction of what we read. "We study a monumental work, for example, Kant's work, and in time it shrivels down to Kant's little East Prussian head and to a thoroughly amorphous world of night and fog..." While the thrust of the idea seems clear, why are readers of Kant left, in particular, with the residual memory of his little East Prussian head? Do readers of Kant generally have a physical picture of him in mind that is more powerful than his writing? Was he a man of small stature, or did he have a particularly small head? Or are readers recalling a memorable Kantian reference to a little East Prussian head? Or perhaps Kant was renowned for owning a small East Prussian head (a bronze, perhaps)? I have no idea, and don't want to spend time researching Kant on the internet to better understand Messud's essay on why she writes.

When the essays move from the literary heights to more mundane concerns, they suffer, at times, from an earnestness and a tendency to critique contemporary problems without offering anything new (Trump-era politics, climate change, social media, school bullying). With little humor in the collection, the sections on modern social issues felt like being cornered at a party by a well-intentioned but overly serious guest. The essays on "How to Be a Better Woman in the Twenty-First Century" and "Teenage Girls" fall into this category. While the sentiments in each essay are highly laudable, they are also predictable, and add little to the collection.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this eclectic mix of reflections on her life, related to her literary criticism and review of authors who have influenced her (happily including Kazuo Ishiguro, Jane Bowles, Italo Svevo, and Jane Cusk – for I have read all or some of their key books), and inspiration drawn from art, Claire Messud shows the power of art and literature’s as a force for human connection, healing, and discovery – not just in trying times, but in all times. Literature deals with the human condition, as Saul Bellow wrote so powerfully.

Much of the book has been previously published in publications like Vogue, The Paris Review, Granta, and The New York Review of Books. I found it, nevertheless, useful to have them combined into one bound volume – this book. I could see patterns in the writing. The collection offers a snapshot of Messud’s engagement with “the vast compendium of recorded human experience, from which we draw wisdom, solace, or, at the least, a sense of recognition.” These moments, works, and conversations allow Messud – and, by extension, us – “to slow the hurtling, to calm the chaos, to return to the essentials that make us human.”

“Reflections” focuses mostly on Messud’s family relationships through vignettes of wide-ranging analysis and evocative narration. In “Then,” Messud reflects on her itinerant childhood spent in the United States, Australia, Canada, and France. Messud finds, in her childhood experiences, an appreciation for the life of the mind. Grappling with the prospect of her father’s death in “The Road to Damascus,” Messud recounts traveling to Beirut to explore the city of her father’s childhood. These moments shaped her vocation as a novelist. As reader, we can all identify with such a quest, a search in history for meaning.

One unexpected and joyful essay is “On Dogs,” in which Messud details what she has learned from her dogs. The essay touches on the question of free will and the necessity of “enjoy[ing] what you have and not lament[ing] what you’ve lost.” The lessons Messud draws from her canine companions – and the lessons imparted in all these essays – inspire and entertain. Perhaps the most consequential essay, and the source of the book’s title, is “Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write.” In this essay, Messud wrestles with Thomas Bernhard’s eponymous metaphor for the futility of writing and the incommunicability of human experience.

The second and third sections, “Criticism: Books,” and “Criticism: Images,” are guided by Messud’s belief in the revelatory power of literature and art – that “[w]e are as much the sum of our lived literary experiences as of our literally lived experiences.” She discusses classics and contemporary works by authors like Albert Camus, Jane Bowles and Valeria Luiselli. While some readers may find Messud’s wide-ranging literary allusion and challenging diction daunting, her intelligent analyses reveal the subtle layers of the texts in question. In her evaluation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, for example, Messud unpacks important lessons about the role of utility and the liberal arts in contemporary society.

The final – and shortest – section of Kant’s Little Prussian Head offers Messud’s art criticism. In essays on Alice Neel, whose images “do with paint and ink what novelists attempt with words: to illuminate the interiority of individuals, to put their souls on paper,” and her favorite pieces at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, among other subjects, Messud demonstrates that the same lessons learned from life and literature can also be found in painting. Messud is not an art critic, and I was pleased that the bulk of the book was focused on literary criticism, albeit her reviews of artists were penetrating and insightful. I loved this book. 

[Ruby Constance · Rating 5 out of 5]

messud's favourite word is definitely 'palimpsest' lol, it shows up in every second essay. and fair enough! what a great word! I'm stealing it.

i enjoyed the art writing as much as her autobiographical essays so the second half wasn't as jarring to me as to others, though starting off with some heavy historical literary stuff about Camus and Algiers was a bit dense for me BC i had no idea about Algiers. I guess I have a slightly better idea now? but I had to look up some stuff. a lot of stuff. to get context.

i enjoyed this a lot! I haven't read any of her fiction, just picked it up at book grocer's because I like reading people writing about writing and art and the title is lovely.
She's such a knowledgeable writer, with so many good quotes from her and other authors. Her literary focuses are very interesting writers like Rachel Cusk, and she is concerned with tracing the truth of the author and the world through their work, and where their subjectivity comes through. Palimpsestically, if you will.

As she writes, 'WG Sebald's semiautobiographical narrator emerges chiefly through what he chooses to relay about others.'

Hence, an autobiography through essays‼️

[Nuha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to WW Norton and NetGalley for the Reader's Copy!

Now available.

A legend in literary fiction, Claire Messud's Kant's Little Prussian Head is a series of musings on the author's international childhood, her own career and writing and critiques on other literary works. While I certainly appreciated getting a closer look at Messud's own family life - the way she mimicked her mother's reading preferences for Dostoevsky as a young teenager was both adorable and melancholic - it was Messud's literary critiques that truly captivated me. For example, her analysis of Italo Sveno's "Zeno", one of my favorite books, changed the way I conceptualized the work earlier. Whether it's a deeply personal story about her father's struggles with alcoholism or a stroll through an art gallery, Messud has a way of drawing a reader in with a knowing nod and maternal wink. Definitely recommend whether you are a long term Messud fan or a newcomer to her work.

[Cassie Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wasn’t a fan of her family essays. Her privileged background and arrogant asides were an eye roll to read, and entirely unrelatable. The upper class and their musings are not easy to endure.
However, I did enjoy her essay about her dogs and applaud her refusal to play god over their lives by putting them down just to make her own life easier. I appreciate her depth of thought and compassion here. I also appreciated her regret at trying to change her aunt as that family member’s death drew closer. It seems that in retrospect she learned of the futility, and even cruelty, of that instinct to change others, even if intending to protect them. I respect that growth.
I also loved her essay on Never Let Me Go, which is one of my favorite books and has also stayed in my thoughts over many years.
Overall, the bitter taste in my mouth at the first part of this book faded once she moved into her stronger territory of self-critical reflection and review of other’s work.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not usually a huge fan of essays, but the title grabbed me, and I needed a book for my train ride home, and one of the essays was a review of Magda Szabo, who I love. I'm very glad it spoke to me. My favorite essays were the more autobiographical ones, and the essay about her father's death happened to come to me when I was visiting a dying relative and was very helpful in my processing of the situation. I was not as captured by the book reviews, mostly because I have so many tabs open from the New Yorker and the Paris Review that it felt like being ''forced'' to read a bunch at once was counter to my usual way of doing things, though I could tell that Messud is a very attentive, sensitive reader and someone I'd want reviewing me if I were an author. My reading list certainly expanded. And now I'm curious aboud Messud's other works.

[Ronald Koltnow · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of essays. The first part, the strongest part, is a series of recollections about Messud’s international family and the drive that shaped her fierce intelligence. Messud may be dedicated to art and literature but is not above writing about elderly dogs and teenage cliques. The second part of the book comprises book reviews and art reviews. The problem with her book reviews is that she gives too much of the plot away. Messud does not seem the type to write SPOILERS! at the start of her reviews. My problem with the art reviews is that they made me want to see some of the art under discussion. No illustrations. The final essay in the book is a walking tour through the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In times of Covid, it is nice to visit a familiar place, if only in prose.

[Kathleen Hulser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Claire Messud deploys her writer superpowers to tells stories of family, dog, pet peeves and favorite authors Her insight is sharp, tempered with chagrin: as her mother memorably used to say, "there's still so much of life to get through when you realize your dreams won't come true." Dealing with the formidable challenges of a family divided between proper old English Canadians and pied-noir eccentrics, Messud grew up appreciating quirkiness and good literature. She admires those who dare to discover the losers, the fatally flawed, the disappointed and the futile, from Italo Svevo and Magda Szabo to Alice Neel and Marlene Dumas. Messud is modest in these autobiographical essays and yet consistently fresh.

[Micebyliz]

i loved this book. it was like chocolate...i made notes of names, a few authors i had not read and notes to myself of things i should remember about what i had read. i really ought to have this on my shelf because i won't remember anything :) and could use it for reference. This is what i really need. a book that helps me analyze and understand what i'm reading instead of me swirling around in my own head thinking that i understand.
I loved the story of her family, and her experiences around the world, and only took exception to a couple of things..(this is not too jaw clenching) and i loved her take on authors meanings, etc.
why does she not live next door to me?????

[Pat · Rating 4 out of 5]

The personal essays that form the first part of the book are really fascinating. They made me want to have another go at her novel "The Emperor's Children" which I couldn't get into on my first attempt. Messud has a very interesting background and you can see why she was drawn to story writing as she coped with a very peripatetic life. The reviews towards the end are very academic in style which is not surprising based on her academic career and a life centered around literature.
I picked this book up from the library `lucky dip' shelf of new books and I am very glad that I did.

[Goldie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Claire Messud's excellent and moving essays made me both want to weep and run to my desk to write something, anything! Each essay begins someplace familiar to me but then twists somewhere and becomes far more internal, far deeper, far more piercing than I could have imagined. And the language! Something like peach juice from the very best peach of your life, in a tiny French village, in the mountains, on a perfect blue sky summer day. Loveliness. This is so worth your time. DEFINITELY recommended.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and inspiring, the best praise I can think of for an autobiography. Messud's family history is nothing short of fascinating: her grandparents and parents were educated, opinionated, well-traveled and there's clearly so much love and admiration between the generations. Her literary and art criticism inspired me to revisit Teju Cole, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Mann and learn more about Magda Szabo, Alice Neel and probably others. A treat of a book.

[Mattschratz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid stuff. I enjoyed both the autobiographical material and the stuff about books. The title essay, and the title phrase (from Bernhard) are especially good. I thought about recommending the essay about Messud's elderly and disgusting dogs, one a dachshund, to my mother or sister, who themselves live with a pair of elderly and disgusting dogs, both dachshunds; but I worried the recommendation would read as an insult and have instead put it here on Goodreads, where they only *might* find it.

[Ellen Sherberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt as though I was meeting Claire Messud for coffee as she shared stories of her family or critiqued a famous woman artist or reminisced about the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Since I’m not meeting anyone for coffee during Covid, I found the time spent reading this book especially fulfilling and looked forward to getting to know her through the essays.

[Francescajemm · Rating 4 out of 5]

The memoir pieces are in incredibly rich and vivid, although that emotional connection lags a bit on some pf her reviews, roughly the second half of the collection. I lost track of how many times she used the word palimpsest- it’s a fantastic word! Messud is as knowledgeable a writer as I have read in a long time, and she’s very generous with her knowledge. Thoroughly enjoyed it!

[Snillocygreg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some well considered essays on books and other things that made me want to read books and look at other things - NOT because I agree with Claire Messud's opinion on our shared reading, but because she has successfully made me curious and I am in a literary dry spell.

Now it has started raining, so I have started reading. Thanks, Claire.

[Cameron Barham]

“In the parking lot of the nursing home where Father Bob delivered the last rites to my father, my mother, mildly demented, remarked, with sadness in her voice, but also with considerable calm, ‘There’s still so much of life to get through, once you realize that your dreams won’t come true.’”, p. 62