Maira Kalman is brilliant!
This book reads like stand-up comedy for philosophical masses. The stories are snippets: commentary sometimes, sometimes personal stories. And they're delivered with a stand-up's or a performance artist's timing and pithiness, paired with paintings that demand to be looked at alone in a second paging through.
The still lifes are both paintings and moments within stories that manage, in so few words, to make you feel the insanity-causing dichotomies of love and remorse, love and rage, generosity and greediness, and every other opposite that we all contain. All this crazy turmoil of emotions is life. Or as Kalman writes: "the seething savagery / of our mundane lives." (81, slash connotes line breaks, as in poetry)
Maira Kalman is part gleeful sprite and part ancient wise woman. A true original who's found her niche—despite my comments about stand-up comedy and performance artists, this work is exactly what it should be: a book of writing and art. Long may Maira Kalman live, write, and paint.