In order to live comfortably as myself in a culture that drools over milk glands and coerces women to repurpose and repackage them in order to maximize the drool we can collect as capital, this is what I have to do. Fortunately, between movies, TV, Instagram, billboards, sidewalks, beaches, pools, and every other space on planet Earth, the world is crawling with opportunities to practice. And then maybe one day soon, I’ll be able to attend the world premiere of some movie Mike stars in with Jennifer, Anne, and Bonnie without exploding into mist.
Péter Esterházy once wrote that Péter Zilahy is the white raven of Hungarian literature who can observe the world each time as if for the first time, always fresh and original. While it’s labeled a novel, The Last Window-Giraffe is essentially uncategorizable, a hippogriff of a creation fashioned from fragments of history, autobiography, and wild invention. How such a wealth of elements—from childhood memories to political atrocities to the poignant evocation of the correspondence between sexual awakening and the deaths of dictators—could be gathered and spun into such a coherent narrative is a kind of aesthetic miracle.
Decades after leaving her hometown in the wake of a tragedy, a woman returns to find that the mysteries of the past are determined to reassert themselves in the present. We’ve heard this tale before, but Polly Stewart buoys The Good Ones with finely drawn characters who harbor a pleasing passel of secrets.
This is a memoir that unfolds partly as retrospective, partly as journal entries kept in real time and partly as poetry — literal poems that break up the meditative narrative into language that is even more heightened and lyrical. But there is hardly any reason for such distinctions. It is impossible to do justice to the beauty of “Returning Light.” The whole book is a poem.