1) What are you reading now for pleasure / leisure / relaxation?
Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening, by Stephen Kuusisto.
2) Why did you choose it?
Kuusisto, essentially blind from birth, was nonetheless brought up to live like a sighted person, a story of absurdity and triumph he tells in an earlier book, Planet of the Blind. It's an amazing story. This follow-up was originally subtitled, A Life by Ear.
"Stephen Kuusisto has John Milton's gift. 'The soul's path,' he claims to have learned from the blind poet, 'is in the ear - not in the mirror.' Kuusisto's blindness is not complete: He is able to see 'colors and torn geometries.' 'But what a thrill it was to be a sightless child in a city of sounds,' he writes." - Susan Salter Reynolds of the Los Angeles Times
“As readers familiar with the lucid candor of his earlier Planet of the Blind would expect, Mr. Kuusisto’s new memoir, Eavesdropping, about living with blindness, is about vision, ways of seeing with other senses, principally hearing. The writer is a poet, and it is not surprising that his words clearly have been heard by him before we hear them.”
—W. S. Merwin, author of Present Company: Poems
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Eavesdropping is full of felicitous surprises, most of them stemming from Kuusisto’s ability to push language past its workaday boundaries in order to deliver the experience of listening in a startling, revelatory light. But the greater surprise is the realization that this book isn’t about the experience of blindness so much as about the experience of apprehending, of taking in. Ultimately, it’s a clear, unsentimental book about the glories of being awake in the world.”
-- Leah Hager Cohen, author of Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kuusisto stunned readers with his unique first memoir, Planet of the Blind (1998), and now, following a poetry collection, Only Bread, Only Light (2000), he continues his inquiry into the consequences of blindness in scintillating linked essays that chronicle his learning to live life by ear. Kuusisto reveals more of his disturbing childhood, during which his brooding grandmother became his first "guru of listening." The future writer spends hours alone enthralled to birdsong, rain, the radio, and vintage recordings of Caruso. As Kuusisto recounts further seminal moments and improbable adventures, he presents exquisitely rendered soundscapes that capture aspects of the world most of us barely register, from the storm of traffic to the cacophony of our myriad machines to the songs of trees. As he goes "sight-seeing by ear" in places as diverse as Iceland and Venice, and celebrates the music and literature that sustain him, Kuusisto foregrounds the aural realm, and evinces great tenacity and trust in his candid tales of life as an acute and comtemplative listener in a loud and hectic world. --Donna Seaman
YA/S:Kuusisto's accounts of childhood are haunting, his sense of sound revelatory, and his approach to disability inspiring. DS
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Most of us see the layers of space, but Kuusisto, who has been legally blind since birth, hears them. In these vivid essays, the poet (Only Bread, Only Light) and memoirist (Planet of the Blind) indulges and investigates the active listening he deploys to navigate the world around him. He is a keen observer. A crowd is not a crowd to him: instead it is a series of sound points, indicating space, pace rhythm and mood. The wind is just as complex, as it "carries fragments of noise from far places like an absentminded uncle who doesn't remember what's in his old suitcase." Music is a constant companion, starting with trees tapping on windows, birds calling and his discovery of a Victrola in his grandmother's dusty attic. At times, he lists sounds to guide the reader through his interpretation of a scene, as when he comes upon "four hundred drunken men pushing and cursing" in an airport in Tallinn, Estonia, their boots making the "metaphysical noise called 'the edge of night.'" Through all these sounds and their meaning to him, Kuusisto reveals the nuance of the heard world, transporting the reader as he maps the aural landscape. (Sept.) -- Publisher's Weekly