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Title: Seeking Rapture : Scenes from a Woman's Life by KATHRYN HARRISON ISBN: 0-375-50558-X Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 13 May, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Mothers
Comment: While Kathryn Harrison is in a New Delhi hotel lobby she hears the following spoken on Indian TV by an ascetic: "Human Destiny is a field that is sown with misfortune." And this pretty much sums up this collection of intelligent, insightful, funny, sad recollections or "Scenes from a Woman's Life" by Harrison.
In "Seeking Rapture," Harrison lays bare her soul, opens up her veins and in the process reveals a tortured relationship with her family and specifically her mother: "Mysteriously, unexpectedly, this stranger (a Christian Scientist practitioner) had ushered me into an experience I cannot help but call rapture. I felt myself separated from my flesh and from all earthly things...I had no words for what happened---I have few now, almost forty years later...I learned at aged six, that transcendence was possible: that spirit could conquer matter, and that therefore I could overcome whatever obstacles prevented my mother's loving me. I could overcome myself."
But like many who have tortured relationships with a parent, Harrison cannot help but be the dutiful daughter and when her mother becomes ill, she attends to her: "In trying to explain why she (Harrison's mother) had been so remote, my mother told me that inside herself she had discovered a fortress, assembled brick by brick by psychic brick to defend herself against my grandmother. 'The problem is,' she said, starting to cry, 'I don't know the way out. I'm stuck inside myself."
So much of this book is so honest and probing that you will have a hard time reading through some sections without wincing at the truthful, heartfelt prose. But what you also take with you after the last page is read is the feeling that for Harrison these recollections equal catharsis. As she writes in "Mother's Day Card" when she talks to her dead mother at the side of her children's beds: "Each night, by their beds, knees mortified by Lego, elbows planted among stuffed animals, I'm being rehabilitated."
Rating: 4
Summary: Shocking, Beautiful and Really Well Written
Comment: There is no doubt that Kathryn Harrison can hold a readers attention in the palm of her hand like no other author out there. Her previous work, "The Seal Wife", "The Binding Chair", "Poison", "Exposure" and my personal favorite "The Kiss" are some of the most powerful, complex and impossible to put down.
Ms. Harrison's newest book, "Seeking Rapture - Scenes From A Woman's Life" are selected stories from a life of many levels. From the abandonment of a mother, betrayal of a father, motherhood and lighter mood stories of cheating on her driver's test, Ms. Harrison's work is never boring and always effective.
"Seeking Rapture" is a wonderful collection of prose from an exceptionally talented writer who never seems to shy away from the taboo or shocking and, I really admire her for that.
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Title: The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison ISBN: 0380731479 Publisher: William Morrow Pub. Date: 01 June, 1998 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: The Mother Knot : A Memoir by KATHRYN HARRISON ISBN: 1400061911 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 01 June, 2004 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Road to Santiago (National Geographic Directions) by Kathryn Harrison ISBN: 0792237455 Publisher: National Geographic Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Saint Therese of Lisieux (Penguin Lives) by Kathryn Harrison ISBN: 0670031488 Publisher: Lipper Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Seal Wife: A Novel by Kathryn Harrison ISBN: 081296845X Publisher: Random House Trade Pub. Date: 13 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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