A dispatch from a foreign land, when crafted by an attentive and skilled
writer, can be magical, transmitting pleasure, drama, and seductive
strangeness.
In The Moon, Come to Earth, Philip Graham offers an expanded edition
of a popular series of dispatches originally published on McSweeney's,
an exuberant yet introspective account of a year's sojourn in Lisbon
with his wife and daughter. Casting his attentive gaze on scenes as
broad as a citywide arts festival and as small as a single paving stone
in a cobbled walk, Graham renders Lisbon from a perspective that varies
between wide-eyed and knowing; though he's unquestionably not a tourist,
at the same time he knows he will never be a local. So his lyrical
accounts reveal his struggles with (and love of) the Portuguese
language, an awkward meeting with Nobel laureate José Saramago, being
trapped in a budding soccer riot, and his daughter's challenging
transition to adolescence while attending a Portuguese school--but he
also waxes loving about Portugal's saudade-drenched music, its
inventive cuisine, and its vibrant literary culture. And through his
humorous, self-deprecating, and wistful explorations, we come to know
Graham himself, and his wife and daughter, so that when an unexpected
crisis hits his family, we can't help but ache alongside them.
A thoughtful, finely wrought celebration of the moment-to-moment
excitement of diving deep into another culture and confronting one's
secret selves, The Moon, Come to Earth is literary travel writing of a
rare intimacy and immediacy.
