M train

I read this book because I'd seen it cited somewhere and found it interesting. It isn't organized as an ordinary memoir with a chronology to follow, but it has its organization arranged around these deeply felt presences: authors who have influenced to the author, people who have been close to her and shaped her soul, places from the Far East to North Africa which call to her soul.

The M in the title may be related to Memory but also Mind as the author focuses intently on the famous and forgotten, less in music, more in the visual and literary arts. She visits graves and places associated with these important figures, many of which she captures as moody Polaroid pictures that are reproduced in the book. She gives lectures on subjects close to her, one at a Berlin meeting of the society devoted to the discoverer of continental drift, Alfred Wegener. There are striking poetic passages that feel like something she just discovered in the world, not something she composed, which made me think about the way she captured the Polaroid pictures just as they look when she comes upon a scene. The feelings are intense but she describes them simply, placing each one into a context. Along the way, she has her own personal losses notably the death of a husband at an early age, and the near destruction of her house off of Rockaway Beach by Superstorm Sandy.

I found this book absorbing at the same time I recognize the sense of aimlessness that some readers might not like. I would like to read the memoir she wrote before this one which talks about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe at the end of his life.