February 15, 2021
A writer smitten with the interplay of language and meaning discourses on art, literature, and the joys of reading. Eisendrath, professor of English and chair of medieval and Renaissance studies at Barnard College, disarms readers with her opening lines: "New York City, August 2021. I died and then found myself walking across a large, green field," where she encounters Virginia Woolf and several admirers. Eisendrath carries a manuscript, diffidently, which she offers to Woolf, and to us. The writing is in non-narrative mode, possessing its own brand of unity--or planned disunity. The author presents a kaleidoscope of pieces and themes, fractured but not scattered, which she terms a book of "clouds." Her mind wanders from the Italian pastoral romances of the late 15th and early 16th centuries to English literary, social, and art history, from 20th-century prose fiction to her own personal life. But she always returns to Elizabethan-era writer Sir Philip Sidney and his intricate romance Arcadia (her book's only sustained motif). From an early age, reading provided Eisendrath with solidity and engagement, a means of inhabiting her own mind "with a pose of sufficient complexity and suppleness that it felt real and also could whir along with a certain lightness." Her observations appear in episodic fashion, though her erudition and perceptiveness are no pose. She is a gifted stylist, finding surprise around every corner. She muses, as Sidney did, on action vs. contemplation, and she navigates a brief history of prose style, including the major 17th-century literary shift that introduced a less oratorial, more realistic and colloquial vocabulary. Even for confirmed litterateurs, her caravan of clouds can have extraneous passengers, her language becoming as ornate as Sidney's. But she also grounds herself in everyday matters, offers appreciative and insightful character sketches, and shows she is as conversant in photography and theater as she is in literature. Eisendrath deftly melds aestheticism with a strategy of creative digression.
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