Part literary history, part personal memoir, Alice Brittan's
beautifully written The Art of Astonishment explores the rich
intellectual, religious, and philosophical history of the gift and
tells the interconnected story of grace: where it comes from and
what it is believed to accomplish. Covering a remarkable range of
materials-from The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad, and the tragedies
of Classical Greece, through the brothers Grimm and Montaigne, to
C. S. Lewis, Toni Morrison, J. M. Coetzee, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove
Knausgaard, and Jhumpa Lahiri-Brittan moves with ease from personal
story to myth, to theology, to literature and analysis, examining
the nature of social and communal obligation, the role of the
intellectual in times of crisis, and the pleasures of reading. In
the 21st century, we might imagine grace as a striking and refined
quality that is pleasurable to encounter but certainly not
fundamental to anyone's existence or to the beliefs and practices
that hold us together or drive us apart. For millennia, though, it
has been recognized as essential to the vitality of inner life, as
well as to the large-scale shifts in perspective and legislation
that improve the way we live as a society. Grace is also
astonishing-always-as the enormously insightful readings in The Art
of Astonishment show. Brittan reveals the concept's breadth as
sacred and secular, ancient and recent, lived and literary. And in
so doing, she shows us how the act of reading is like grace-social
but personal, pleasurable and essential.
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