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Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography in Essays
Maybe someday
44
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
21/100Critics
67/100Scholars
Author:
Claire Messud
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
Date:
October 13, 2020
Messud reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia; the complex relationship between her modern Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt; and a trip to Beirut, where her pied-noir father had once lived, while he was dying. She meditates on contemporary classics from Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, and Valeria Luiselli. She explores her drive to write.
What The Reviewers Say
Our Dogs is one of about 25 essays in Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, and it’s in many ways emblematic — the elegance of it, the challenge of it. Messud isn’t a writer who grabs her subject matter by the throat or pumps her prose full of kinetic energy. She moseys, she circles, she lies in wait. She sighs where others might scream, mists up where others might sob, ponders 'holistic foulness' where others might just run for the cleaner-smelling hills.
She risks coming across as elitist — ouroboros, for those who lack her formidable vocabulary, refers to a snake swallowing its own tail — but her intent is generous.
Even the title of this richly drawn anthology of more than two dozen essays, Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other REasons Why I Write, speaks to the dry wit and arresting spontaneity that permeate her very personal reflections on life, great authors of the past and present, and art in various forms. Although at the peak of her creative power, Messud also seems to be casting an experienced retrospective eye over several decades of critically acclaimed writing.
... an uplifting work: complex, precise and bracing.
