Overview

In this memoir, Sascha Feinstein recounts life with his father, Sam Feinstein, who was both a brilliant artist and a hoarder of monumental proportions. He collected only uncollectible objects—artifacts that required him to give them importance—and at the time of his death in 2003, his hoarding had fundamentally destroyed all three of his large homes. Despite this, Sam Feinstein was a remarkable painter and art teacher. This strange double helix of creativity and destruction guides these collage-like reflections. Like his students’ canvases—paintings inspired by enormous still lifes constructed from the world’s refuse—this book incorporates myriad sources in order to create a more layered experience for the reader. The final result is the depiction of a painter with the highest artistic ideals who nevertheless left behind an incalculable amount of physical and emotional wreckage.

Full Product Details

9781611487855

Table of Contents

Reviews

Just as his father, a master scavenger, made art from things he found, Sascha Feinstein has fashioned a beautiful book out of the hard facts, peculiar love, and brilliant ruins that are his relationship with his father. Wreckage tells the moving story of the father, this great architect of junk who lives in his paradise of accumulation, and the difficult but persistent love of the son. In Feinstein's pages I felt transported back to an older Cape Cod, of dump-picking and ticks and drive-ins, and to a time before antiseptic, air-conditioned homes when quirky beauty counted, and where that beauty grew hidden amidst the brambles. In the end, Wreckage is the story of love and reclamation, of making something out of what was lost. -- David Gessner Taking on the wreckage, Sascha Feinstein writes of the overwhelming, impossible legacy of junk the artist and hoarder who raised him left behind, meant taking on my father. This book is his accounting: desperate and funny, horrifying and artful, and much less bitter than it had every right to be. If the father's legacy suffocates, his son's accomplishment is to find not only room to breathe, but the gifts and challenges that launch a young writer on his way. The buoyancy required to survive a father's excess becomes a son's source of strength, enabling him to build-with the good help of poetry, jazz, and the movies-a self and a family, and even to restore a nearly ruined house to radiant life. -- Mark Doty With two painters for parents, neither able to earn a livelihood from art, and one of them, his father-a master scavenger who teetered on the threshold between genius and madness-Sascha Feinstein might well have chosen to strike out on a safer path. Instead he became a poet, an essayist, and an aficionado of jazz-three pursuits guaranteed not to lead to a pot of gold. But the literary world is the richer for his choice. In the elegiac Black Pearls, he delved into memories of the year, during his teens, when his mother died of cancer. In Wreckage he becomes an archaeologist of his father's leavings, both physical and emotional. From three houses and from an overgrown lot on Cape Cod, all crammed with a bizarre accumulation of stuff, he salvages a few treasures. From mostly troubling memories of a self-absorbed father who was stingy with praise and stingier with love, Feinstein salvages rare moments of inspiration and joy. In so doing, he fulfills his father's dream of transforming junk into beauty. -- Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Private History of Awe

Just as his father, a master scavenger, made art from things he found, Sascha Feinstein has fashioned a beautiful book out of the hard facts, peculiar love, and brilliant ruins that are his relationship with his father. Wreckage tells the moving story of the father, this great architect of junk who lives in his paradise of accumulation, and the difficult but persistent love of the son. In Feinstein's pages I felt transported back to an older Cape Cod, of dump-picking and ticks and drive-ins, and to a time before antiseptic, air-conditioned homes when quirky beauty counted, and where that beauty grew hidden amidst the brambles. In the end, Wreckage is the story of love and reclamation, of making something out of what was lost. -- David Gessner, author of Return of the Osprey and All the Wild That Remains Taking on the wreckage, Sascha Feinstein writes of the overwhelming, impossible legacy of junk the artist and hoarder who raised him left behind, meant taking on my father. This book is his accounting: desperate and funny, horrifying and artful, and much less bitter than it had every right to be. If the father's legacy suffocates, his son's accomplishment is to find not only room to breathe, but the gifts and challenges that launch a young writer on his way. The buoyancy required to survive a father's excess becomes a son's source of strength, enabling him to build-with the good help of poetry, jazz, and the movies-a self and a family, and even to restore a nearly ruined house to radiant life. -- Mark Doty, author of Heaven's Coast In Wreckage, Sascha Feinstein becomes an archeologist of his father's leavings, both physical and emotional. From three houses and from an overgrown lot on Cape Cod, all crammed with a bizarre accumulation of stuff, he salvages rare moments of inspiration and joy. In so doing, he fulfills his father's dream of transforming junk into beauty. -- Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Private History of Awe

Author Information

Sascha Feinstein is professor of English and co-director of the Creative Writing Program at Lycoming College.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available