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 Working With Available Light: A Family's World After ViolenceJamie Kalven (1999) One of the too often ignored aspects of sexual violence is the way that it devastates not only its victims, but all who support and care for them: families, communities, and our culture as a whole. Working With Available Light is a compelling and resonant account of how one woman's family has been impacted, in ways large and small, by the sexual violence done to her. On a perfectly ordinary autumn afternoon, photographer Patricia Evans, out for a run on Chicago's lakefront, was beaten and sexually assaulted. In the wake of this defining event, nothing in her life, or the life of her family, would be the same. Evans's husband, Jamie Kalven, has written a brutally truthful memoir of thier family's struggle in the wake of this assault on Evans. As husband, daughter and son try to make sense of the violence that has entered their lives - and neighbors and friends respond with both confusion and care -- Kalven juxtaposes the rituals and routines of ordinary life as they reassert themselves against a new landscape: one of loss, grief and mourning for all that was before Evans' attack. Covering a period of five years, during which Evans redefines her place within the world, and her relationships to her husband and children, we see, with brutal clarity, the long-term effects of sexual assault on the family. Yet in reading this book we are bearing witness to something more: a love story, where the love is real and tested and true and above all lovely. Perhaps literary critic Cythia Ozick has put it best: "The ghost of violence hovers over these pages; also a certain beauty - the beauty of transparent and pellucid prose animated by a sensibility at once tender and unsentimental. The clarity and purity of Kalven's sentences are an astonishing vehicle for the exact rendering of terrors. This is a remarkable book." |