Migratory Birds, Mariana Oliver

In the early 2000s, I wrote an undergraduate thesis on exile autobiography. Theories of migration, dislocation, borders, cosmopolitanism, were pretty trendy back then, and although acknowledged as a painful experience, exile was still being romanticized as providing a privileged kind of perspective (Kader Konuk writes compellingly about this moment in theory in East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey).

Anyways, after really immersing myself in that work for ~2 years, I got…kind of sick of it. And remain a little leery, even today. So I admit that I was a little skeptical of Migratory Birds. But the description mentioned essays about Berlin and Cappadocia, two of my favorite places in the world, and I was already buying Aftermath from Transit Books, and getting another thing would mean free shipping, so...I bought it. And then it arrived and it was so beautiful looking, and invitingly slender, and I was so heartily fed up with unpacking and all the millions of other things I was supposed to be reading and writing that I thought: I’ll treat myself and dip into this.

And I was instantly hooked. The opening essay is about migratory birds, yes, but also, unexpectedly, about a man who built a flying machine, who ended up flying with birds. It’s lovely and tender and surprising, and strikes just the right balance between lyricizing sentiment and cool detachment — an increasingly tricky balancing act, these days. And the rest of the essays follow suit. Though the book covers some terrain you might expect — language, historical trauma, sense of place — it moves over it in unexpected ways, and from the vantage point of a broad collection of places (Berlin, Istanbul, Havana). It’s a real treasure of a book. I wanted to read it in one sitting, but was called to other obligations, and spent most of the time away from it yearning to return. Already, I’m looking forward to rereading it.