After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart
This is not a typhoon-like book that will knock you over with its coherence, but irregular winds blowing this way and that, some hotter than others ... Like decorating a house, Marshall suggests with this book, the act of crafting a biography is never really finished, and certain odds and ends can be hard to clean up.
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Poignant ... She draws sustenance from the women in her biographies, all of whose lives were bordered with calamity and loss.
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Ms. Marshall is at her best when a piece of material evidence—a letter, a photograph, a forgotten artifact—piques her interest ... Perhaps the most poignant chapter of After Lives is set in Kyoto, where Ms. Marshall spent a few months as a visiting professor and found herself on the trail of Japan’s version of Henry David Thoreau, the poet Kamo no Chōmei.
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