Unpleasantries

Considerations of Difficult Questions

Frank Soos

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780295998404
• eBook ISBN:
  9780295806709
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Even from upside-down in his recently flipped truck, Frank Soos reveals himself to be ruminative, grappling with the limitations of language to express the human condition. Moving quickly—skiing in the dark or taking long summer bike rides on Alaska highways—Soos combines an active physical life with a dark and difficult interior existence, wrestling the full span of "thinking and doing" onto the page with surprising lightness. His meditations move from fly-fishing in dangerously swift Alaska rivers to memories of the liars and dirty-joke tellers of his small-town Virginia childhood, revealing insights in new encounters and old preoccupations. Soos writes about pain and despair, aging, his divorce, his father's passing, regret, the loss of home, and the fear of death. But in the process of confronting these dark topics, he is full of wonder. As he writes at the end of an account of almost drowning, "Bruised but whole, I was alive, alive, alive."

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Another Kind of Loneliness
• Mont Sainte-Victoire, Approximately
• I Held Their Coats: A Study of Two Jokes
• A Little Iliad
• Obituary with Bamboo Fly Rod
• Upside-Down with Borges and Bob
• Meditation on My Cousin Lou, Dead at Thirty-Three
• Glamour and Romance
• Other People’s Pain and My Own
• The Man on the Bridge
• Naked to the World
• Dead Animals I Have Known
• Why Is It That We Do This?
• Driving Directions to the Homes of the Dead
• Some Fibbers
• No Place Like
• Falling In
• I Built a Little Boat; or, The Necessity of Failure
• Kinds of Ambition
• Acknowledgments