Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.

The Beautiful Unseen

A Memoir

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
At age thirty, Kyle Boelte finds himself living in San Francisco, where the summer fog blows inland off the ocean and the landscape changes moment to moment. Amidst this ever-changing sea of fog, Boelte struggles to remember his brother Kris, who committed suicide in the family’s Denver home when Boelte was just thirteen.
In this impressive debut, Boelte sets up a dual narrative: one investigates San Francisco’s climate to explain the science behind the omnipresent fog; another explores Boelte’s memory as well as letters, notes, newspaper articles, and other artifacts that tell the story of his brother’s short life and eventual suicide.
Weaving a complex and engaging story from personal, historical and environmental threads, Boelte’s search for meaning takes him to a range of unexpected places: from San Francisco Bay circa 1901, when fog was responsible for routinely sinking steamships, to a cavernous medical library where he studies the grim details of asphyxiation and death by hanging; from the redwood forests where scientists are now learning about fog’s ability to sustain life, to a beat-up cardboard box containing memories of his long-dead brother.
The Beautiful Unseen is as much a meditation on experiencing loss at an early age as it is a study
  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

  • Formats

  • Languages

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      December 1, 2014
      An extended meditation on fog, perception, memory and mortality.This debut is even more ambitious than it is elliptical, as Boelte tries to come to terms with the suicide of his older brother when both were teenagers and with the nature of fog, both as a physical manifestation and as a metaphor. He compares memory to fog in "how it obscures the world, confusing the seen and the unseen. And then, how it slowly disappears from sight until the world is once again visible." The prose can be a little too preciously poetic, overly conscious of its effect, but the narrative has a powerful anchor amid the mists of fog-the brother who committed suicide, perhaps in response to the LSD he had been using and then caught dealing, half a lifetime ago for the author. There's a catharsis within this narrative strand, as the author remembers what he had previously blocked and comes to terms with what was once familiar but has been lost in the fog of memory. There is little in the way of chronological progression, as the story jumps back and forth among the fog-bound present in San Francisco, the coming-of-age (and death) in Colorado, and the legacy of fog in the historical annals. The metaphor almost collapses under the thematic strain, but just as it seems that Boelte has circled back a time or two too many, he shows that he knows what he's doing, evoking the philosophy of the great painter Mark Rothko: "If a thing is worth doing once, it is worth doing over and over again-exploring it, probing it, demanding by this repetition that the public look at it." In this occasionally overwrought but often moving memoir, Boelte ends with a different perspective than when he started.

      COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from February 1, 2015
      When he was 13, Boelte came home from school expecting to find his older brother, Kris. He didn't, and promptly proceeded to do what most teenage boys do in the time before parents get home from work and homework must be tackled in earnest: he watched TV, listened to music, whatever. What no one realized was that Kris was home, having hanged himself in the basement just hours earlier. Now, more than 20 years later, the guilt associated with his brother's suicide, its causes and ramifications, are ready to be analyzed in ways that were previously impossible. Living in San Francisco, far from the upscale Denver suburb where Kris died and the rural Kansas town where he was born, Boelte finds a personal mission and an apt metaphor for his brother's state of mind and his own emotional miasma in the fog that permeates the San Francisco hills. With lush, expressive imagery that conjures an uncertain emotional and physical terrain, Boelte conveys the deep, abiding sense of loss such tragedies inflict, yet softly, tenderly communicates the conflicting sensations of confronting memories, both lost and found.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

Languages

  • English

Loading