POSSIBILITY
ESSAYS AGAINST DESPAIR
Witty, philosophical, and closely observing, Possibility: Essays Against Despair traces a progression of surprises: encounters with the natural world, with painting, film, and literature, with affection, grief, and delight, in writing that transforms time’s bite into pleasure. The collection opens with a series of stories playing with the way writing itself changes experience, as when Henry Adams’s ironic observations about Japan are revealed to be the ground for unmentioned grief over the death of his wife. Then a second section picks up the theme of loss and mourning, letting different ways of writing grief take its measure, but leading to a section that takes up how wide and strange and interesting indeed is the world even so. Here are encounters with manatees, wild turkeys, snakes, and children—a hopeful interval leading into the final section, where the play of narrative focuses on the freedom of art, and that rapid, breathtaking display of formal innovation, the movies.
PRAISE & REVIEWS
Reading Patricia Vigderman is like attending an ideal dinner party, where everyone has read your favorite books. Her essays wind particular passages of Proust, or George Eliot, or W.G. Sebald around personal moments. David Foster Wallace’s story “The Depressed Person” is threaded throughout an essay about her own relationship with a loved one’s serious depression. Vigderman’s responses are fresh and original and her sounding of our collective literary treasures are likely to send you back to read them again, now overlaid with her embroidery.
–Mona Simpson
Time and again for Vigderman, the word or vision of a writer (say Proust, or W.G. Sebald) immerses her beneath surfaces. The discoveries she then makes are always floodlit by further questions, additional speculations, which prompt her to reconsider the initial surface. As her mysteries multiply, the mood of the lighting only gets cheerier. I was never in a hurry for the motion to end.It may be that Vigderman is positing, finally, that a mind not at rest is one less likely to sink.
–The Rumpus
The essays dwell not on despair, but on the project of translating chaotic experience into art or memory. She is enthusiastic about beautiful language and new words—and her writing, lyrical and graceful, shows it.
–Publishers Weekly
In her elegant, short volume of essays, Patricia Vigderman asks questions about possibility and its opposite….the possibility that there is much more than we think we see or know, and that it may all be intertwined. Art with travel. Inheritance with beauty with pain. Nature and animal life with history with humor. Proust. David Foster Wallace. Grace Paley. Reading with art museums with film with metaphor. The possibilities seem endless because….Vigderman’s mind is so alive on the page, so full of tangentially interesting questions.
–ForeWord
These essays were ten years in the making. They will take you with them to France, Texas, California, New York, Japan, Delft, Florida; they will take you into art. Read them. They are wonderful!
–Miriam Levine, author of The Dark Opens
Possibility: Essays Against Despair has a casual, graceful elegance from start to finish. The intelligence in these pages is cumulative, essay to essay, adding up to a dense, steadily illuminating sensibility in which I enjoyed dwelling.
–Katharine Weber