Author/Writing lovers: Add it to your library

What to look for in winter

The prose goes on about many people. Author Candia Williams writes `It is hard to know where to start with Rosa since it is a story of extreme compensation for absences.'
For the reader: Who is Rosa? A schoolmate.
For the author: Every acquaintance in her life is an attempt to understand them.
Her description style of people which toelines along `greedy obsessive recall of trivial' is the author's way of recalling all that has ensued now that she has gone blind. If you like description, of architecture or people, the author has hinged the book on it and supported it very well and still trying to put it all in words- of a fort, after few lines, she asks - `how to describe it?', an ongoing attempt.
We have to see if by `picking up lost bits and pieces of my(her) scattered life to try to make something whole by putting it all together, my own flotsam and jetsam' , if she can find a frame for her life. With the `precise naming of things' she wants to see if she can will her sight back.
The author is always wary of letting us know that she is speaking from her Edinburgh times and acknowledges that things could be different now.
In the first half of the book, everyone she meets is under scrutiny. In the later part, she confines it to her family. She tries to understand her father. Her ex husbands and their current benign families. I felt like a good reader when I read the lines: `phase one, the first bit of memoir, to toughen up and prepare for deeper digging; phase two, this bit to, to do that deeper digging, in order perhaps to see more..' that I got the book like she meant it while writing.
If you think that the author is unsure with her frequent questions like`How does one write about marriage?' ,she does start and end with a quick summary of what that or the next chapter is about. The book has a story quality to it.
For the author her writing /art is a fallback. In her words - `I had discovered a great pleasure of the painful side of life: its relief, or exacerbation, by literature'.
On the borderline of neither blind nor well sighted, the author writes of how her blindness changes her lifestyle and how she enjoys and generates literature. As she is trying to bring everything to name she accedes that `It is this feeling of docking cleanly that grows more elusive with blindness'.
When I picked this book, I had to overlook her alcohol addiction part of life in light of the heavy leaning towards writing in the book. Even of the alcohol addiction and getting out of it, the author has written in an exploratory way, like a natural history of an alcoholic.
I have to mention that the book is rife with many new words, so look forward to some dictionary time.
Some lines I liked:
We are polite but so far havent offered tea.
Lonely for them.
"`Do you know how to make a fishing net?' The answer is that you find a lot of holes and tie them together. `
I could say that this is the metaphor that works for the whole book.