Customer Reviews

An Elemental Thing (New Directions Paperbook)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There are some music albums that make you listen to music differently than you ever had before.

'An Elemental Thing' has forced me to read differently. It's not an ungainly monster like Proust or an unreadable trainwreck like Naked Lunch. Nonetheless, it has taken my thinking and my own internal narrative (at least for the duration of my reading) into weird sideways hallways and inexplicable culs-de-sac of color, texture, and meaning. You will learn why tigers have become endangered while at the same time not really knowing if you can trust what you've learned. A history of Chinese discoveries is shortly followed by a short history of the Peruvian desert peoples and their penchant for heterosexual sodomy.

Reading this book is like drinking cold, clear, water.

If you enjoy Jorge Luis Borges, this author is highly recommended.
What differs Eliot Weinberger -- is that this seeming casual collection of refined essays intricately builds a single whole. Whole, for which author himself suggests a name of "vortex".
Picture by Hiroshi Sugimoto on the cover and the book supplement each other well.
(sorry for bad English)

I imagine this collection as a watercolor painted by Borges - little surprise considering that the essays are largely dealing with Chinese themes and that the author translated Borges into English.
An Elemental Thing is the perfect title for the book. It breaks apart the common reality into separate pieces, which contain no plot but beauty that, in a sense, surpasses any plot, because the universe doesn't have one. So don't air, sunset and love. They simply are.
In our world of commercialized and predictable clones, this book is a unique creation.

I imagine it must be awfully frustrating to have written so many interesting pieces and to have so little response. The world is drowning in utterly predictable writing. Eliot Weinberger's essays are more in tune with what the word "essay" once was: attempts, explorations, something more tentative but justified by rich interest and a genuine wish to understand. The millions of essays written every day now: the "news' for example, really don't provide any nourishment for the soul, which is what literature started as. Now it's mostly pretend.

People who already know all about everything will find little satisfaction in Eliot Weinberger, but if you are not so sure and still have some innate hopefulness about the possibility that the universe is intentional, I think you will really be glad he took all the trouble he undoubtedly took to write all these curious, poetic essays.

This is possibly the most amazing writing I have ever read. Each essay is beautiful and brilliant on it's own, but once I got to the fifth or so essay I could feel a very subtle big picture being painted, and that was the real knock-out. It would be too much to say what all of these together say or mean, but there is beautiful underlying cohesion.
I can't find the exact quote, but one reviewer said something like, "Eliot Weinberger seems to have personally seen or read about every event in history." Indeed.