Plea for Eros: Essays Book

4.5*
Whether she talks about memory, the self, passions, feelings or words, Siri's essays from this volume really hit home with me. I could not help but highlight lots and lots of fragments from this book because they could mirror ideas that have been fleeting through my mind at times, ideas that I never could quite grasp.

She talks about places that live in our mind once we have left them in the essay/short story called "Yonder" which is my favorite from the collection. She talks about how we imagine them before we arrive and how "they are seemingly called out of nothing to illustrate a thought or a story". She talks about things that stop being random objects once they are connected to a story, a person or a feeling. She talks about disparate memories that are very vivid in her mind while other more significant details are totally left out, making me wonder what the mind's criteria of selection for remembering things are. She talks about her grandparents and her parents, about memories and time, about reading and seeing. "The place of reading is a kind of yonder world, a place that is not here nor there, but made up of the bits and pieces of experience in every sense, both real and fictional, two categories that become harder to separate the more you think about them." In "A Plea for Eros", she explores what makes us fall in love with some particular persons and not with others. And what exactly creates attraction. "A combination of biology, personal history, and a cultural miasma of ideas creates attraction. The fantasy lover is always hovering above or behind or in front of the real lover, and you need both of them." In one of the essays she analyzes the subtle connection between words, memory and the self by applying her knowledge from psychology and neurology on Dickens' characters that seem mad or seem to have a shattered inner world. "This story we call the self and articulate as I, Dickens tells us, is fraught and fragile, and we must fight to keep it together."I thought that her way of applying concepts from science on characters from fiction was brilliant. "As the connective tissue of time, memory is certainly essential to the internal narrative we create for ourselves." The essays about Great Gatsby and Henry James's The Bostonians did not resonate much with me, the former because I am not a fan of Great Gatsby and the latter because I have not read the book, but I still could extract some really good ideas from them.

I really liked the last essay where she talks about how she met Paul Auster and fell for him and about how she would spend hours and hours in the library (I probably really liked this essay because this also really hit home with me). "In college I retreated to the library. I have always loved libraries - the quiet, the smell, the expectation of imminent discovery. In the next book I will find it - some unspeakable pleasure or startling revelation or extraordinary nuance I had never felt or thought of before." "Some words, sentences, and phrases sit forever in the mind like brain tattoos." And so do most of Siri's ideas expressed in this book of essays.