BOOKENDS, DISCOVERIES
Author: SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS. LOS ANGELES TIMES Date: Sep 24, 2006 Start Page: C.35 Edition:
EAVESDROPPING: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening, by Stephen Kuusisto. W.W. Norton, 224 pp., $23.95.
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.
"Eavesdropping" has two parts: The first is the author's reconstruction of his childhood in Finland and the woods of New Hampshire. In Part 2, he describes his world travels.
Kuusisto, who is 50 and teaches English at Ohio State University, makes the world larger with his descriptions of landscapes, rooms, conversations, birdsong. He describes the "fat sound" of a horse breathing and the "corridor of footsteps" in the night ward where he lay as a child recovering from an operation on his eyes. He describes his loneliness when his alcoholic parents would send him off to his grandparents' house in New Hampshire, where he spent hours with an old Victrola in the attic, listening to Caruso records.
In Part 2, we float with the author through various landscapes, some (like an airport) more threatening than others. He hears the sounds of caged birds in Venice echoing through the canals; he hears the clacking of a woman's knitting needles on a late-night subway ride. In Fenway Park, he overhears two fans on acid describe Pedro Martinez, then pitching for the Boston Red Sox, who "sheds strands of iridescence: long moonglow strings of light as he throws."
This is writing that enriches the reader's life by heightening the reader's senses. Amazing to be reminded that flat, stolid letters on a page can actually course through one's veins, can cause the synapses in one's brain to transmit their hopeful message: There's more! There's more! There's so much more than meets the eye! |