Out of Nowhere Into Nothing
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Essays on the apparitional, the incomprehensible, and the paranormal in conversation with art, travel, and storytelling
The ghosts—literal and figurative—that drive our deepest impulses, disturb our most precious memories, and haunt the passages of our daily lives are present in this collection of sublime meditations on the unbelievable, the coincidental, and the apparitional. Often containing reflections on the art of storytelling, Caryl Pagel’s essays blend memoir, research, and reflection, and are driven by a desire to observe connections between the visual and the invisible. The narrator of Pagel’s essays explores each enigma or encounter (a football coach’s faked death, the faces of women walking, historical accounts of hallucinations, a city’s public celebration gone wrong) as an intellectual detective ascending a labyrinthine tower of clues in pursuit of a solution to an unreachable problem: always curious, and with a sense of profound wonder.
Out of Nowhere Into Nothing is a sprawling, highly associative consideration of the ways in which the observed material world recalls us to larger narrative and aesthetic truths. Interspersed with documentary-style photographs, Pagel’s first collection of prose is a radiant, obsessive investigation into the mysteries at the center of our seemingly mundane lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Pagel (Twice Told) explores themes of the coincidental, uncanny, and paranormal in this frequently brilliant but sometimes unwieldy essay collection. She touches on a wide range of subjects, from history and literature to math, art, and architecture; from small-town life or urban goings-on to the day-to-day of ivory tower denizens. The narrative threads Pagel weaves are delightfully if somewhat transgressively entertaining, and convey a sense of intimacy with those in her life: parents, siblings, colleagues, lovers, friends, and enemies. The prose is luminous ("Bright beams shimmer and shake stars sparkle in the mirror of your stare"), and Pagel's insights about her experience of mental illness never totter into the maudlin or trite; indeed, her observations are notable in that she bravely takes a stab at answering difficult questions, such as what constitutes love: "To love is to mesmerize and be mesmerized by to pay attention and requires maybe more than anything an enchanting narrative." Unfortunately, the collection is marred by Pagel's choice to omit paragraph breaks from entire chapters and include a number of nearly page-long sentences, which read as self-indulgent and gimmicky. Nevertheless, fans of Joyce Carol Oates and To the Lighthouse will find much to love.
