Customer Reviews

Karmic Traces

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

 

 

Aestheticians have, I think, long wrestled with the question of whether art's value lies in its spontaneity or its control. The spontaneous, like a volcano, will cover more intellectual ground, whereas the controlled, a sort of rose in the irion filings, gives us the precision of high aesthetic achievement. Here in Weinberger's book of essays, as much art as about art (or politics, culture, history, Iceland, and more), we experience the breadth & expanse of imaginative knowledge plus the exact control of fine writing & a clear mind; with Weinberger the volcano IS the rose in the iron filings. Nothing like essays anyone has ever written for school, nor like much of nonfiction available anywhere, these essays are moving in all senses of the word: they move from topic to topic, moving us as well. Weinberger, whose sense of language has come from years of translating Spanish and, recently, Chinese, is one of today's few intellectuals not affiliated with any university. He is thus as rare as an intellectual in medieval Europe unconnected to the Church; Karmic Traces, colossal & microscopic at once, is likewise as unique a find.

Karmic Traces is a fascinating collection of essays featuring twenty-four of Eliot Weinbergers writings taking the reader along his personal travels ranging from the Atacama Desert to Iceland to Hong Kong. Here are also to be found imagined voyages among strange religious cultures and even stranger animals. The capping work is "The Falls", wherein Weinberger recapitulates 3,000 years of history to uncover the deep roots of contemporary racism and violence. Karmic Traces is a highly recommended body of writing that is as vivid as poetry, as entertaining as fiction, and as informative as any travelogue of mind and body.

I have been deeply immersed in books and reading for more than twenty-five years, and Weinberger's 'Karmic Traces' is without doubt my favorite book. Why this is so is a little hard to capture in a review. Weinberger's work is almost uncapturable. It is hard to define where he fits as a writer. He is a literary essayist and critic; poet, translator, travel writer and historian. Weinberger is also a writer of great social conscience.

Weinberger writes simple prose essays of extraordinary beauty, on the most surprising and inventive of topics. He does not pick his topics simply because they are interesting, however. Weinberger's topics are driven by a great, human depth of meaning.

In "Karmic Traces," we learn of a popular theodicy of medieval Denmark so perfect in its divine consolation that the reader is tempted to adopt it for herself. And we learn of Omar Caceres, an astonishing poet so obscure that only Weinberger has heard of him! We learn of the ancient and self-duplicating practice of slavery -- which renews itself in each generation with new captors and new victims -- yet remains the same in all particulars, except where it takes on new rationalizations peculiar to the dominant culture.

My life has been enriched by reading Eliot Weinberger. Weinberger should be required reading for anyone interested in history, literature, anthropology, ethics and current events.

J Jennifer Matthews
author of "Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are."