Genre: Autobiography/Memoir
Page count: 106
Attention. Retrospection. Prayer. Writing. Listening. Gratitude. Life… the end of Offill’s autobiographical book matches perfectly with its title – attention and speculation. Experience and contemplation. I heard about Offill last year when her latest book ‘Weather’ was shortlisted for the Women’s prize, and heard great things about it. However, the praises for her latest book stood on her career defining book from 2012 ‘Dept. of Speculation’; a very intriguing title, I have to admit.
Not only was I, and still am, excited to read Offill, but had an almost certain feeling that I would absolutely adore it. And I absolutely did adore this book! There are things about this book that seems ordinary, at least ordinary enough not to stand out in the sea of books that piles up higher every year.
Take its number of pages for example, 105; desirably few to invite lazy readers, yet too few for it to able to stay anything significant. Or Offill’s prose which reads like an essay written by a common writer, at least for first tens of pages. However, both despite and because of its seeming and almost deceiving ordinariness, it succeeds brilliantly to impact the reader in subtle, light, and important ways.
Put another way, it becomes ‘extraordinary’ by the time you’re done reading it.
I wouldn’t be underrating this book if I say that it is just an ordinary person writing about her ordinary life. It definitely reads like it. But if an ordinary person, like you and me, starts writing about his or her ordinary life, things do not remain ordinary anymore. Writing in itself is a contemplative exercise, a speculative one, a narration in which you form a story and attach a meaning to it. Even if you do not intentionally aim to achieve these ends as you sit down to write, writing does it all by itself.
Offill has written a book that relates to the readers, to their human parts, to resonates with their being alive, with their experiences. Her prose, simple, light and funny provides an effortless reading experience, while her content is nuanced with key take-aways and quite a few literary insights.
‘Good writers are good readers first’ it is said, and Offill doesn’t hesitate to mention, what I think are her favorite writers, including Kafka, Eliot, Rilke, and more. And much like her prose, she mentions these writers simply by writing ‘what Rilke said:’ or ‘what Kafka said: or ‘what T. S. Eliot said:’ and quotes some of their most unique and contextually befitting lines.
The story itself includes, what I presume, Offill’s own experiences of loneliness, birth of her daughter, her relationship and marriage with her husband, being a ghost writer for an ‘almost astronaut’, being friend to a philosopher, and later, her husband’s adultery, and also her daughter’s growing up.
Although a one-directional story, it isn’t told one continuous narration. It seems as if Offill chooses what parts of her life and experiences to include, not to paint a flawless picture, but on the contrary, one that is important, contributive, ordinary thereby relatable, and unique to what she wants to say. Offill writes in bits – fragments of common experiences – while being aware that her idea is to tell a whole experience of living through certain ages of a long life.
And what she has manages to produce, to form, to
carve, in this book is delightful, fun, pointing, contemplative, and ordinary –
with an ‘extra’.
Rating: 5/5 ***** January 14, 2021_