Review by Booklist Review
Smith (M Train, 2015), a contemplative writer of gratitude and reverence who names her muses in poems, memoirs, and songs, deepens her inquiry into the nature of inspiration in this slender, trenchant volume, the first in Yale's Why I Write series. In lyric essays, a story, poems, and photographs, Smith illuminates the whirl of chance and choice that stokes a writer's imagination, recounting her fascination on the eve of a trip to Paris with Simone Weil and an evocative, accidentally discovered film about Stalin's mass deportation of Estonians. In France, a gravestone, a televised figure-skating competition, a meal, and a garden all converge in what becomes Devotion, an exquisite and devastating fairy tale about a young, displaced Estonian skater and a solitary dealer in rare objects and arms. This reverberating and tragic fable about creativity and obsession, possession and freedom is followed by a meditation on how a work of art is, for other artists, a call to action. Gracefully improvisational, as always, Smith offers an unusually poetic, mystical, and transfixing perspective on the mystery of literary creation.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Musician and author Smith (M Train) tries her hand at that most meta of projects: writing a book about writing. This is no craft manual, however; instead, her slim volume contains a single novella bookended by a pair of personal reflections on the tale's genesis (she's inspired to write about a discourse between "a sophisticated, rational man and a precocious, intuitive girl"): among the reflections are her descriptions of a trip to Paris while obsessing over Simone Weil and Soviet deportations; a remembered photograph taken decades before; and wood carvings, seen on a visit to the home Albert Camus, that Camus bought with his Nobel Prize money. The lesson is obvious: that a writer draws on every detail of his or her life for the alchemical, often unconscious process of creation. But seeing the process in action is a profound experience. Smith's writing in the essays is as beautifully structured as her poetry, so the novella's mundanity comes as something of a shock: an orphaned young girl with an obsession for ice skating is stalked, groomed, and abused by an older man, and both meet tragic ends. Smith's writing about her novella is much more thoughtful and captivating than the novella itself. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Much-honored rock goddess and writer Smith (M Train, 2015, etc.) returns with a hurried meditation on miscellaneous deep things, including the title topic.Where Just Kids (2010) was alive with bohemian exuberance and M Train was one long product-placement vehicle, the latest seems like a knocked-off magazine piece for some vaguely spiritual enterprise. At the core of this slender volume, part of the publisher's Why I Write series, is a love story, of sorts, concerning an Estonian skater who bears more than a passing resemblance to the young Horses-era Smith: "She was small with porcelain skin and thick dark hair with severely cut fringe." Every idea she has of herself is in complete relation and devotion to skating; "I excelled in school," she intones, "yet nothing before skating gave me the tools to express the inexpressible." Naturally, the unflinching Eugenia had to make a tough choice, and guess what she stopped doing? In memoir-ish vignettes bracketing this story, Smith writes of the French martyr Simone Weil, to whom she directs a poem with a rather awful couplet about Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (surely Weil deserves better); of visiting Albert Camus' home and being given time alone with the manuscript of The First Man, with its "unflinching unity with his subject"; of surrealists and anarchists and travels here and there. Sometimes Smith catches a poetic wave and rides it capably, as when she writes, "it occurs to me that the young look beautiful as they sleep and the old, such as myself, look dead." It's not the profoundest thought she's ever expressed, but it's nicely rendered all the same. Not so many other passages, thoughe.g., can a monotone be lilting? Not Smith's best workfine for devotees but pretty thin gruel for the uninitiated. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
