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5.0 out of 5 stars
Interior Places--Essays for the Ages, April 13, 2008
This review is from: Interior Places (Paperback)
Written by John McKenna
Interior Places, by Lisa Knopp, is an extraordinary journey below the facile, surface reality of an unexamined life into those deep, interior worlds where Truths like gemstones lie awaiting discovery. This splendid collection of sixteen essays spans a tremendous variety of subjects, approaches, and insights. Through it all, Knopp is able to craft each essay with the skill of an expert gemologist--each paragraph becomes a facet of the overall design that makes the interior theme glow with all the iridescence of a peacock's tail. Interior Places combines personal passions with public issues, careful scholarship with surprisingly fresh personal slants, and metaphorical formulations with ecstatic revelations. This book immediately rewards the more casual reader, and it also rewards the more thoughtful reader interested in parsing experiences for enduring truths. Interior Places is a rare and valuable gem, an important book, a must read.
As Knopp shows in her earlier collections of essays Flight Dreams, Field of Vision, and most recently, The Nature of Home, she writes in the tradition of literary journalism. An essay like "In the Corn" is scholarly and compelling at the same time. Although I grew up on a farm where corn was a crop, Knopp teaches me more about maize (Zea mays) and its origins and dependency on mankind for propagation than I had ever known. But this essay is more than a disquisition into corn, for her pen conflates maize into more than a crop; it blossoms into a metaphor. As one subtitle asserts--"metaphor clarifies and obscures." So that when Knopp looks at the prairie of her home state of Iowa and her adopted state of Nebraska, while driving past fields of corn, she says, "When I look down the corn rows, one identical vanishing point after another whips past." In an important way, this is a metaphor for Knopp's insight into the ordinary world where infinity lurks in the ordinary.
The ability to tease the universal from the particular, the world from a grain of sand, to reference Blake, is the business of all creative nonfiction writers and Knopp is a master of finding universal truths in the world at hand. One of her most charming essays, "A Bit of Land," describes the astonishingly varied and variegated backyard of her small house in Lincoln, Nebraska. Nurtured by her hand and also by her benign neglect, an incredible array of flora and fauna thrive in her backyard. Including Knopp herself and her two children, Meredith and Ian, a triumvirate that might be the most interesting inhabitants of her wilding quarter acre. As in everything Knopp turns her penetrating and observant mind to, she concludes about her backyard that it's "a bit of land whose wonders I have yet to exhaust." Both for herself and for the reader, so we know that she will return to marvel again at the extraordinary in the ordinary and post an irresistibly charming invitation for the reader to accompany her on her musings.
One of the essays that remains in the mind of this reader is "Tending" which describes Knopp, accompanied by her daughter Meredith, as they volunteer to help hand out food to indigent people at a local food bank. Not only does this essay reveal Knopp's considerable idealism and social-consciousness but it also is a considerably clear-eyed look at the regulars who line up to give and to receive groceries at the food bank. Knopp might be a romantic at heart (she is) but she also is capable of skewering three pushy, quarrelsome rogues whom Knopp dubbs "The Aunties." Selfish and self-involved these three harpies give Knopp a perfect opportunity to paint the repulsive with a light touch.
Knopp is a philosopher at heart and her disquisitions encompass a wide range of topics--from natural history, to social justice, to personal ethics. In the essay, "Departure Moon," she uses the changing appearance of the moon and the changes that perspective and place bring to make an important inquiry into the mutability of human, and her, life. She laments life and loss but concludes that she accepts mutability, accepts "a planet teeming with life and death, arrivals and departures, arisings and passings." It's "the only place to live." Knopp is achingly aware of her own mortality and of the ephemeral nature of her relationship to her children. It is clear her essaying is, in part, an attempt to fix some part of that relationship more enduringly in time.
In "Traces," set at the funeral of her beloved grandmother, Knopp hopes "my children [will] carry some of these fragments with them to guard against the day when my memories have been whittled down to nubs . . .." Yet she also realizes and accepts that change is inevitable and in the essay, "Surrender," she uses the metaphor of capturing (for banding) and releasing song birds as a metaphor for rearing and releasing one's children. "I realized that the bird in the open palm was also a symbol of my mother's idea of how to parent. Let them go when they want; let them return when they want. Don't grasp." As any parent knows, that is a difficult balance. Perfect balance is difficult in life and in art, but Knopp's Interior Places achieves this difficult balance with great grace and great beauty.
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