The visible unseen
Description
Andrea Chapela, one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists of 2021, breaks down literary and scientific conventions in this prize-winning collection of experimental essays exploring the properties and poetics of glass, mirrors, and light as a means of understanding the self.
In powerful, formally inventive essays, The Visible Unseen disrupts the purported cultural divide between arts and science. As both a chemist and an award-winning author, Chapela zeros in on the literary metaphors buried in the facts and figures of her scientific observations. Through questioning scientific conundrums that lie beyond the limits of human perception, she winds up putting herself under the microscope as well.
While considering the technical definition of glass as a liquid or a solid, Chapela stumbles upon a framework for understanding the in-between-ness of her own life. Turning her focus toward mirrors, she finds metaphors for our cultural obsessions with self-image in the physics and chemistry of reflection. And as she compiles a history of the scientific study of light, she comes to her final conclusion: that the purpose of description—be it scientific or literary—can never be to define reality, only to confirm our perception of it. Lyrical, introspective, and methodical, The Visible Unseen constructs a startling new perspective from which to examine ourselves and the ways we create meaning.
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Kirkus Book Review
An inquiry into transparency. Making an impressive nonfiction debut, award-winning fiction writer Chapela brings the perspective of a poet to three lyric essays that probe the act of seeing and the challenge of communicating what is perceived. With a mother who is a mathematician, a father who's a physicist, and a background in chemistry, the author is sensitive to the limits of both science and language to represent reality. "How can I write about science from outside it?" she asks. "How can I stop seeing through language, using it as a tool, pretending exactitude is possible in words?" In the scientific world, even though "each repeatable experiment and proven hypothesis brings us closer to some absolute truth," Chapela believes that an experiment--like a painting or poem--"is a representation of reality that astonishes us." Any representation of reality is conveyed in words, themselves not "solid" and "reliable" but malleable and contingent. The author investigates three forms--glass, mirrors, and light--that pose singular conundrums: Glass is not a solid, but neither is it a fluid. So what is it? "Even the most basic sources disagree," she writes. Light "creates shadows" but "doesn't cast them. Though it seems the most natural conclusion, it leaves me feeling unsettled." Mirrors invite Chapela to think about the connection between selfhood and reflection. As she moves between her native Mexico and Madrid, where she travels on cultural grant, and between present and past, she draws on a host of provocative thinkers, including Galileo, Newton, Descartes, da Vinci, Niels Bohr, Marie Curie, and Richard Feynman, whose writings underscore the importance of metaphor in science and who validate her curiosity, uncertainty, and celebration of mystery. "It took me a long time to accept that writing helps me understand the questions," she admits, "rather than nailing down the answers." Philosophical meditations graced by radiant prose. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.