The title cloud of Matt Donavan's extraordinary nonfiction debut, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape, refers to the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius that in 79 AD buried the city of Pompeii under twenty feet of ash. Today a remarkable 2.5 million people a year visit the ruins of the Italian city. It's no surprise, then, that Donovan found the sacred place a site of inspiration and power, devoting six pieces to exploring the homes and villas that have been preserved. Donavan takes off from various points in the Roman ruins to explore the inconstancy of any given moment alongside the processes used to make casts of the vacancies left by the city's dead to create positive monuments to their last gestures.
Donovan pursues the image of the cloud throughout his spell-binding meditations on ruin and redemption. He explores the cloud of the original atomic bomb test at the Trinity site. From there, he inevitably touches on the same cloud rising above Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He uses the occasion of the provocative film The Day After," aired in 1983, starring JoBeth Williams, Steve Guttenberg, John Cullum, Jason Robards, and John Lithgow, to explore a fictional account of a nuclear attack on the U.S. Though his mother objected to Donovan's seeing the film, it was shown in his school, giving him another cascading image of the mushroom cloud, which was viewed by 100 million people, making it the most-watched TV broadcast in history. In his signature style, Donovan takes off from the literal event to explore how our imaginations are shaped by the popular images of nuclear destruction.
Moving from atomic devastation to the beauty of the cherry blossoms in Washington, DC, Donovan finds the sort of uncanny connections that enliven his work at every turn. For the war years when the U.S. was fighting Japan, the cherry trees in our nation's capital were downplayed. Much later they were resuscitated to create a festival to celebrate the lovely clouds of cherry blossoms beloved by visitors and citizens alike.
Tragedy becomes more personal for the author when a dear friend is diagnosed with cancer. And there are heart-stopping references to the campus of Kent State, where as a kid, Donovan explored the site and the ruination of six students killed during an anti-Vietnam-war protest.
In the final section of the book, Almost a Full Year of Stone, Light, and Sky," Donovan focuses on the Pantheon in Rome. This expansive lyric essay serves as a kind of bookend to the Pompeii sequence at the beginning. Instead of meditating on a place of apocalypse, however, Donovan explores an ancient building that has avoided, against all odds, of becoming a ruin. In addition to investigating the structure's history, the author explores the uses of secular beauty through interwoven meditations on subjects as diverse as Walter De Maria's Lightning Fields, the legend of the Tower of Babel, the paintings of Caravaggio, and the September 11 Tribute in Light memorial.
Nothing seems to be beyond the reach of this stunningly original writer. The pleasures he delivers inA Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape have to do with the purity of his imagination, the flawless connections he makes from antiquity to the present, from personal experience to historical events, from architecture to art installation to literature. The redemptive power of beauty hovers over this spectacular work, reminding us that darkness and light make an inextricable pattern over our lives. Matt Donovan finds that the delicate balance to honor both, to find the subtle but ineffable rhythms between ruin and redemption, is to find what ultimately makes life worthwhile, what gives meaning to the sorrow and joy of being human.
Industry Reviews
"Matt Donovan's essays are haunted, searching, lyrical, and above all dogged in their ability to conjoin personal history with public history, whether he is investigating the ruins of Pompeii, the Trinity bomb site, or his grandparents' ghostly home movies. His voice is erudite but intimate, and his self-reckonings and troubled reflections almost invariably give way to a bracing sense of wonder. 'Memory,' wrote the ever-canny Walter Benjamin, 'is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theatre.' Matt Donovan understands this metaphor in a manner that is shared by only a precious few of his contemporaries, and his book is a dazzling performance." -- David Wojahn, author of World Tree "In A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape, Matt Donovan spins his obsessions--Pompeii, the Pantheon, Raphael's Transfiguration--into storytelling gold. Donovan's distinctive vision, gorgeous prose, and curious mind combine brilliantly. A pleasure to read, from start to finish." -- Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire "There's no contemporary essayist who can touch Matt Donovan for his companionableness, his easy and immense erudition, and his refreshing skepticism about what Randall Jarrell once called 'the monumental certainties that go perpetually by, perpetually on time.' In our time, the certainties Donovan rebels against are our aversion to facts, our cultural laxness in proclaiming Sensibility King/Queen, and our gargantuan self-regard that wants to see profundity in watching a rhinoceros push a pea from one end of its cage to the other. But never does Donovan scold or rant or turn village explainer. Instead, with self-deprecating modesty and humor, Donovan walks the walk as well as talking the talk. He is devoted to facts, skeptical of himself and his desires, and deeply in love with the contradictory ways that history and personal experience shape each other. His meditations on the atomic bomb, on Pompeii and the Pantheon in Rome, are unparalleled for their speculative reach and grasp of physical detail." -- Tom Sleigh "Matt Donovan masterfully reveals how art elevates what is ruined and captures what is absent. These meditations, which collapse time and geography, bring into poignant relief the nature of the untamable mind and our complexly vexed humanity. At its heart, the book is an homage to the impenetrable mystery of the sacred." -- Kathleen Graber, author of The Eternal City
