Karmic Traces

Eliot Weinberger has spent two decades pushing the essay past both literary criticism and reportage, toward poetry and storytelling. His pieces read like fiction and hold their images like verse, yet every fact in them can be checked. He is politically sharp, learned, and often very funny, and few writers working today sound like him.

This third New Directions collection gathers twenty-four essays. Some follow Weinberger on real journeys, to the Atacama Desert, to Iceland, and to Hong Kong just before its handover to China. Others travel in imagination, aboard a seventeenth-century Danish ship headed for India, or into unusual religious sects and peculiar small creatures. The subjects shift constantly, from Viking dreams and Aztec rituals to Hindu memory, laughing fish, and prophetic dogs.

The closing piece, "The Falls," is a long, ambitious tour de force. In it Weinberger moves through three thousand years of history, assembling a dense run of revealing facts to trace the deep origins of present-day racism and violence.