LIFESCAPES

The mysteries of lives.

Wroe, a biographer and obituary editor for the Economist, offers a graceful, haunting meditation on her life’s work: “catching souls,” her term for capturing “the unique and essential part of ourselves, our self-conscious and transcendent core.” Some biographical subjects were singularly challenging: Pontius Pilate because there was little direct evidence of his daily life, Percy Shelley because there was so much. “Entering the life of Shelley was permanently exhausting, exhilarating, fraught; I would find myself at dinner parties,” she admits, “suddenly holding forth on the freedom of the press or the rights of man, shocking myself as much as anyone else. Because, for a while, I was more than myself.” Her sensitivity to her subjects—“the way they walk, sit in a chair, shrug off a jacket, hold their heads; tiny gestures, snatches of talk”—is apparent in the obituaries she references (a list is appended). She delicately evokes the individuality of poets Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott; singers Miriam Makeba, Joan Sutherland, and Luciano Pavarotti; physicist Steven Weinberg and ebullient tomboy Shirley Temple, among many others. “Life resides in details,” Wroe notes, rather than in a résumé of achievements. She learned from the conductor Claudio Abbado, for example, “that there was a certain sound to snow.” She brings the same attentiveness to her observations of nature and the precise language of her poetry and prose. “On days of mist or snow,” she writes, “the emptier hills and valleys lie like creatures still breathing, as if sheets have been thrown over sleeping bodies or muslin drawn across a face.” A failed clarinet player, she exults in the sounds of woodwinds and reeds, “the voices of wild landscapes.” From inner lives to windswept hills, Wroe’s world is filled with wonder.

A lyrical, radiant memoir.