Description:
Ostensibly, Jamie Kalven's Working with Available Light focuses on a single, life-altering event, but it's primarily about a marriage. While running along Chicago's lakefront area near their home in Hyde Park, Kalven's wife, Patsy, was brutally beaten and sexually assaulted. Apart from the physical damage, which proved fleeting, the attack caused a lingering, often paralyzing sense of fear not only in Patsy but Kalven and their two young children, as well. This memoir covers the five years following the incident and the family's efforts to deal with--and, if possible, learn from--the trauma. The fact that this survivor's tale is written from the perspective of a loved one rather than the victim makes it a particularly interesting story. The experience forces Kalven to confront his own complex feelings of guilt, anger, and loss, as well as to analyze his entire relationship with Patsy. Admirably, Kalven acknowledges that his attempts to comprehend fully his wife's experience will invariably fall short. Working with Available Light is written in careful, elegant, and often poetic prose. It is also unflinchingly honest--almost to a fault. In sorting out his emotions on the page, Kalven exposes nearly every conceivable intimate aspect of their married life, and the effect of such a thorough cleansing is both tender and chilling. "Some experiences can't be absorbed all at once; you must spend your life working to make them yours," he writes. This book is only part of that process.
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