The Beautiful Unseen

December 1, 2014
An extended meditation on fog, perception, memory and mortality.This debut is even more ambitious than it is elliptical, as Boelte tries to come to terms with the suicide of his older brother when both were teenagers and with the nature of fog, both as a physical manifestation and as a metaphor. He compares memory to fog in "how it obscures the world, confusing the seen and the unseen. And then, how it slowly disappears from sight until the world is once again visible." The prose can be a little too preciously poetic, overly conscious of its effect, but the narrative has a powerful anchor amid the mists of fog-the brother who committed suicide, perhaps in response to the LSD he had been using and then caught dealing, half a lifetime ago for the author. There's a catharsis within this narrative strand, as the author remembers what he had previously blocked and comes to terms with what was once familiar but has been lost in the fog of memory. There is little in the way of chronological progression, as the story jumps back and forth among the fog-bound present in San Francisco, the coming-of-age (and death) in Colorado, and the legacy of fog in the historical annals. The metaphor almost collapses under the thematic strain, but just as it seems that Boelte has circled back a time or two too many, he shows that he knows what he's doing, evoking the philosophy of the great painter Mark Rothko: "If a thing is worth doing once, it is worth doing over and over again-exploring it, probing it, demanding by this repetition that the public look at it." In this occasionally overwrought but often moving memoir, Boelte ends with a different perspective than when he started.

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Starred review from February 1, 2015
When he was 13, Boelte came home from school expecting to find his older brother, Kris. He didn't, and promptly proceeded to do what most teenage boys do in the time before parents get home from work and homework must be tackled in earnest: he watched TV, listened to music, whatever. What no one realized was that Kris was home, having hanged himself in the basement just hours earlier. Now, more than 20 years later, the guilt associated with his brother's suicide, its causes and ramifications, are ready to be analyzed in ways that were previously impossible. Living in San Francisco, far from the upscale Denver suburb where Kris died and the rural Kansas town where he was born, Boelte finds a personal mission and an apt metaphor for his brother's state of mind and his own emotional miasma in the fog that permeates the San Francisco hills. With lush, expressive imagery that conjures an uncertain emotional and physical terrain, Boelte conveys the deep, abiding sense of loss such tragedies inflict, yet softly, tenderly communicates the conflicting sensations of confronting memories, both lost and found.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)