Closing the Book Travels in Life Loss and Literature eBook Joelle Renstrom
Download As PDF : Closing the Book Travels in Life Loss and Literature eBook Joelle Renstrom 
Closing the Book Travels in Life, Loss, and Literature explores the intersection of literature and life in personal essays about traveling, teaching, reading, writing, living, and dying. Each essay's narrative arc is formed and informed by the act of reading literature that makes a reader feel like the book she's reading was somehow written specifically for her to read in that exact moment. Renstrom relies on science fiction as a catalyst for grief, as well as a means of pushing past grim realities to begin envisioning life reconstructed and to embrace the idea that "there's nothing wrong with rebuilding forever."
Closing the Book Travels in Life Loss and Literature eBook Joelle Renstrom
This book reached deep inside me and squeezed, over and over. I didn’t really know what to expect from it, but I certainly didn’t expect it to take my breath away like it did. It got personal, and sometimes I forgot that it wasn’t personal about me. In just a few sentences, Renstrom had me thinking that her experiences were mine: raw, familiar, accessible.It wasn’t just because there were some significant parallels between my life and the one she wrote. The unfamiliar parts were mine, too. Some parts were difficult - too difficult to read on public transit or without tissues - and some had me digging out my passport and checking fares to Copenhagen.
Current events, cancer, and Camus all act as landmarks in Renstrom’s essays. For me, the real meat of this book is the constant movement, the pushing past and towards what life throws at us, and the balance between having deeply personal emotions and analytically observing them in the context of those large, somewhat ubiquitous building blocks of the world that we all inhabit. I will pick up ‘Closing the Book’ many, many more times.
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Closing the Book Travels in Life Loss and Literature eBook Joelle Renstrom Reviews
I received a copy of this book recently from a friend and I read it in two long sessions over one weekend; I just couldn't put it down. Renstrom's writing style is rich and descriptive without being verbose and she does a tremendous job of writing in such a way that you feel the emotions she experienced in the situations she describes - you feel the heartbreak, you feel the anxiety, you feel the cold misery of being soaked to the bone in a dark rainstorm and most importantly you feel the relief and hope. Renstrom has clearly lead an interesting life thus far, and lucky for us that she has and has the capacity to write about it so well. I'm eagerly looking forward to her future books.
This book wrestles with a delightful and necessary weight how heavy is love, and how do choices and luck affect our trajectory and our options? The essays are woven around the loss of the author's father, but the relationship with her father is multifaceted, both an emotional and a searching intellectual one. As Renstrom traces all of her questions--about politics, physics, fate, travel, and life--her father is visible in the underpinnings. And this made the book particularly special to me rather than just about grief, that arid place, it was about her father, a living breathing man who dies but remains as alive in these pages as the narrator. This book also succeeds at truly being both a memoir and an essay collection, so it's fascinating from a structural point of view.
Joelle Renstrom’s book Closing the Door is a series of conjoined essays, but it is much more than that. It is a memoir, a travel journal, a glimpse at the growing philosophy of a young woman. Most of all, perhaps, it is an archetypal quest. As Renstrom seeks answers about her father’s untimely death and her life without him, she looks in Europe, in the classroom, and in literature. The comforting part about her forays into questioning various works of science fiction is that Renstrom informs the reader about each novel, so no one can become lost, even with unfamiliar books.
Renstrom not only has a way with words, she also has a way with thoughts which develop and solidify throughout the book. Her heart and mind “turn cartwheels” as she grasps essential elements of life and death. Almost anyone who has experienced the death of a most loved person can understand the dizzying spin she takes us on as she, and we, come to understand a little more about life and mortality.
Her clear honesty vibrates throughout her prose, such as when she discusses having to rebuild her life. “There’s a lesson in the bulldozer. It doesn’t look at the mess [of 9/11] and think this will never be fixed. . . .It keeps going. There’s nothing wrong with rebuilding forever. It’s an apt metaphor for life. Actually, it’s not a metaphor at all” (79). Other great metaphors weave their way among the essays to help us understand Renstrom’s questioning, newfound understanding, and questioning once more.
One important message becomes clear “One can choose to want to be hopeful despite the knowledge that one’s hope probably won’t be realized. This is free will. This is . . . bravery.” Renstrom may be “closing the book,” but her thoughts and images will keep opening doors for readers’ awareness of literature and their own hearts.
The subtitle of this wonderful book is "Travels in Life, Loss, and Literature," and it hits all those targets. Have you followed a parent through ending days or tried to put your life together afterward or read great books that touch you at these moments? Renstrom's essays will speak to a wide variety of people. The breadth of what she covers is signaled by saying that if you liked Atul Gawande's Being Mortal or Ray Bradbury or Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, you'll like this book also. Unexpectedly moving to me was her description of teaching Camus' The Stranger to high school students. She renders her excitement for the magic that can happen within the classroom setting, with both the most academically-at-ease students and the quiet, recalcitrant non-participating ones being brought into the experience of reading the book. Give this book to those who have lost or are losing parents, especially, to those who love books, to those who teach. Let's make this book one of those word-of-mouth-sleepers that leaps up on the charts!
This book reached deep inside me and squeezed, over and over. I didn’t really know what to expect from it, but I certainly didn’t expect it to take my breath away like it did. It got personal, and sometimes I forgot that it wasn’t personal about me. In just a few sentences, Renstrom had me thinking that her experiences were mine raw, familiar, accessible.
It wasn’t just because there were some significant parallels between my life and the one she wrote. The unfamiliar parts were mine, too. Some parts were difficult - too difficult to read on public transit or without tissues - and some had me digging out my passport and checking fares to Copenhagen.
Current events, cancer, and Camus all act as landmarks in Renstrom’s essays. For me, the real meat of this book is the constant movement, the pushing past and towards what life throws at us, and the balance between having deeply personal emotions and analytically observing them in the context of those large, somewhat ubiquitous building blocks of the world that we all inhabit. I will pick up ‘Closing the Book’ many, many more times.
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