Cairn by Kathleen Jamie (2024)

 Yet another aspect of the current appetite for fragmentary memoir brought into focus. This one is a series of short glimpses which occurred surrounding the author's 60th birthday, looking back to prior life as well as forward to how the world might survive given current pressures, particularly those of a natural and climatic kind. Some are quietly touching, some a bit watery and thin. I haven't read Jamie before, so don't know how this compares to her other work. But what it says to me is that the feelings which occasioned these pieces were probably strong, and that were the reader with her, or able to inhabit her mind at the time, the impact would also be. Instead, the reader is reading this book, and attempting to inhabit her mind through its resources, and coming up with something that I would attest is probably lesser. It does resound, but very mildly on the whole. And it's very interesting that the longer the piece, the greater the impact - she's seemingly a writer who benefits from accumulation. Of course, one must come to the possibility of the conclusion that the written equivalent of an experience will always be lesser than the moment itself. So then it becomes a matter of what means are used to develop the written version towards impact, so as to represent something of its 'hit'. There are moments in the prose here which push that envelope, but a fair amount which don't. I'd be tempted to call this something of a missed opportunity - but it has mild charms.