Kant's little Prussian head and other reasons why I write An autobiography in essays

Exceptionally astute, artistic, and eviscerating novelist Messud (The Burning Girl, 2017) gathers essays and reviews in a collection that affirms the significance and power of "original expression of authentic experience" and the sheer pleasure of reading. Messud's works of finely wrought family history, depicting her Canadian mother's world and that of her French Algerian father, who took the family to "global hot spots" on curiously risky vacations, are candid and spellbinding. Clearly Messud's sharp observational skills were honed by competing family heritages and sensibilities during her cosmopolitan upbringing, and she also contemplates the impact of her youthful reading of women authors. As she picks apart a jumble of memories, feelings, and facts, Messud's personal essays are, by turns, mischievously funny, emotionally wrenching, and elegantly intellectual. In her criticism she writes of Albert Camus (whose background mirrors that of her father), Kamel Daoud, Jane Bowles, Teju Cole, and Carnegie Medal winners Valeria Luiselli and Sally Mann. Writing of our "dark and riven times" before the full misery of our current predicament, Messud steers us to the light of forthright inquiry, truth, and beauty.

A collection of essays fired by "the heartfelt conviction that nothing matters more" than "the power of the word." Messud sets the tone in her impassioned introduction, proclaiming the importance of literature "in a period which can feel like the dawn of a new Dark Ages." Literature connects us to the experiences of others both past and present, she declares, engaging writer and reader in a vital exchange. Part 1, "Reflections," opens with a suite of beautiful memory pieces about a peripatetic childhood--Messud had lived in three different countries and attended five different schools by the time she was 12--that left her with a permanent sense of being an outsider and the conviction that the inner life was the most important. Her parents, a Canadian woman who married a "pied-noir" displaced by the Algerian war for independence, shared this conviction: Messud pays tribute to the knowledge of the female literary tradition she acquired at her "Mother's Knee"; and "The Road to Damascus," a painful, moving piece about her father's death, recalls his lifelong immersion in scholarship about the Middle East, sparked by his childhood in Beirut and Istanbul. The critical pieces in the second and third parts discuss individual works by literary and visual artists as varied as Albert Camus, Jane Bowles, Saul Friedlander, Alice Neel, and Marlene Dumas; the author discerns a common thread in their ability to convey their personal experiences and connect them to larger issues in the world. Messud seldom refers to her own accomplished fiction, but her sense of kinship with fellow writers is palpable, and a short, smart piece on "Teenage Girls" reveals the personal origins of her most recent novel, The Burning Girl (2017). The title essay, riffing on a comment in Thomas Bernhard's novel The Loser, affirms that "even a single successful sentence can be transformative." We can take that as Messud's credo. Powerful and inspirational: Messud is as fine a critic as she is a novelist. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.