Meditations from a Movable Chair: Essays (ISBN 067943108X)

Amazon.com Review:
In his first book of essays, Broken Vessels, Andre Dubus uses experiences such as baseball games and sheep herding as occasions for insight. His second essay collection, Meditations from a Movable Chair, is about the people who have meant the most to him. The book conjures a cloud of witnesses--Dubus's father, his sister, Norman Mailer, Liv Ullmann, a gay military officer--so vividly that their gifts to Dubus become gifts to the reader, as well. Many of these people helped Dubus understand the holiness, even sacramentality, of everyday life, which he describes in explicitly Catholic terms. Meditations from a Movable Chair is a rare and wonderful thing--a book written out of love, whose richness of heart is expressed by an exacting and challenging mind. --Michael Joseph Gross

I met all of his family this January.:
On January 2000, I visited Mr. Andre Dubus' old house and grave in Haverhill, MA. His house was silent like a library and his grave has not been constructed. I showed his letter for me to his family (his son) Andre Dubus III in Newburyport, MA. Though we have not met before we have had same feeling like a deep grief. Also I visited the seashore that this book had taken as a cover. I had translated his work just one in several months for Japanese readers in two literary magazines in Japan. He did not kill by himself, I believe.

A Patchwork Quilt:
A book of occasionally lovely short essays surrounded by a battery of incidental writing that should've been omitted. Dubus at his best, only evident here now and then, offers us writing that builds slowly, gathering a few seemingly unrelated details and weaving them into something uniquely powerful. It shouldn't be surprising then to know that the essays in this book that don't hold up well are all too abbreviated and short, more editorial than essay, ending just as they've begun. His religious thoughts, obviously sincere but still cloying, further interrupt the book's best moments. Dubus however knows when he's on to something, and the essays here that stand out, such as that concerning the suicide of a gay military officer, show why Dubus earned his reputation as a craftsman. Much like his seminal story "A Father's Story," this essay tells us as much of the narrator as it does of the narrative's events. It's writing like this that shows the gulf between Dubus at his best, and Dubus simply on a friendly ramble, unable to mask his innate sadness -- both before and after the accident that left him in a wheelchair. Perhaps that's what this book suggests most clearly, that Dubus never could quite wheel himself away from a depression that's as present as the author's almost daily upper-case Communion.

Thought provoking:
Many people are familiar with Andre Dubois's son and his book(an Oprah pick) The house of Sand and fog. Andre Duboius has long been considered a master of the short story, and the eye that served him well at that craft is equally appreciated when turned inward. DuBois was confined to a wheelchair when injured in an accident, and as a result, accepted the challenge to look inward. In essays detailing his struggle with mortality, his failings, his life as a writer and the struggle to find the sacred in the everyday Mr. DuBois is honest and open. At times, you may think the conclusions are a bit too pat or packaged, and yet, there is no doubt in regards to the sincerity.

Beautiful Thoughts:
"Meditations on a Movable Chair" is a great work of creative nonfiction. Dubus' thoughts resonate by the pure honesty in which they are presented. He gives us glimpses of his life that are important to him. And we see a man; not very unlike ourselves, who is struggling with a life lived in body, soul, and spirit. The result of this baring of truth: a slow, steady, and warm beauty that is Dubus' very own soul. We begin to see something beautiful in the brokenness of man. We begin to see that not everything is broken. There is life: and Dubus fights fort this life and meditates on this life for us. I recommend a slow - meditative - reading of this book to fully enjoy its beauty.

Andre Dubus's Daily Bread:
Shortly after finishing "Meditations from a Moveable Chair," I learned that Andre Dubus recently had died. I was surprisingly startled, considering he was a man I never knew and with whose writing I was merely acquainted. My reaction to the news of his death speaks a great deal about the quality and affect of Dubus's austere and confessional prose. Dubus frequently ends essays in the volume by recalling the moment of the piece's composition, as if he is offering not only an artifice, but the origin, the spot of time and emotion and weather from which the artifice emerged. In some cases this device seems almost redundant because his clean prose seemed already imbued with the sense of being written; especially in the essays recounting manual labor, jogging, or taking churchyard laps in his wheelchair, I imagined a man (resembling the man with a pensive scowl on the book's jacket) hammering away at a typewriter. Despite being about many quotidian things, Dubus's writing reminds me of a few lines of "Song of Myself": "Not words of routine this song of mine, / But abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet nearer bring." Although at times I thought Dubus was simply repeating himself, well, simply, I found the essays to be touching, memorable, and a pleasure to read. "Meditations from a Moveable Chair" is markedly anti-stoic: beneath its equivocal title, the volume effuses the pleasures and pain of life after a literal "wreck of body," and offers itself to its reader as a sacrifice and another one of Dubus's sacraments.