Karmic Traces: 1993-1999

Karmic Traces is a fascinating collection of essays featuring twenty-four of Eliot Weinbergers writings taking the reader along his personal travels ranging from the Atacama Desert to Iceland to Hong Kong. Here are also to be found imagined voyages among strange religious cultures and even stranger animals. The capping work is "The Falls", wherein Weinberger recapitulates 3,000 years of history to uncover the deep roots of contemporary racism and violence. Karmic Traces is a highly recommended body of writing that is as vivid as poetry, as entertaining as fiction, and as informative as any travelogue of mind and body.

Aestheticians have, I think, long wrestled with the question of whether art's value lies in its spontaneity or its control. The spontaneous, like a volcano, will cover more intellectual ground, whereas the controlled, a sort of rose in the irion filings, gives us the precision of high aesthetic achievement. Here in Weinberger's book of essays, as much art as about art (or politics, culture, history, Iceland, and more), we experience the breadth & expanse of imaginative knowledge plus the exact control of fine writing & a clear mind; with Weinberger the volcano IS the rose in the iron filings. Nothing like essays anyone has ever written for school, nor like much of nonfiction available anywhere, these essays are moving in all senses of the word: they move from topic to topic, moving us as well. Weinberger, whose sense of language has come from years of translating Spanish and, recently, Chinese, is one of today's few intellectuals not affiliated with any university. He is thus as rare as an intellectual in medieval Europe unconnected to the Church; Karmic Traces, colossal & microscopic at once, is likewise as unique a find.