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A Flat Place
A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma | Noreen Masud
7 posts | 7 read | 6 to read
...arresting and memorable.Masud both finds a way to comprehend her own story and establishes a strong voice that confirms her as a significant chronicler of personal and national experience. Financial Times "Sharply, subtly, and very movingly, Masud thinks with places, seeking as she does to find a way back into, and then out of, the traumas of her early life." - Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland: A Deep Time Journey A surprising and lyrical journeypart memoir, part nature bookmeditating on the meaning of "flatness" and its literary tradition to find ways to understand ourselves and our trauma in one of natures most undervalued wonders. For readers of Robert Macfarlane, G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn, Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, and Richard Mabey's Nature Cure Does the concept of "flat" have an undeservedly bad rap? There are centuries worth of adoration for rolling hills and dramatic, mountainous landscapes. In contrast, flat landscapes are forgettable and seemingly unworthy of poetic or artistic attention. Noreen suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder: the product of a profoundly disrupted and unstable childhood. It flattens her emotions, blanks out parts of her memory, and colours her world with anxiety. Undertaking a pilgrimage around Britain's flatlands, seeking solace and belonging, she weaves her impressions of the natural world with poetry, folklore and history, and with recollections of her own early life. Noreen's British-Pakistani heritage makes her a partial outsider in these landscapes: both coloniser and colonised, inheritor and dispossessed. Here violence lies beneath the fantasy of pastoral innocence, and histories of harm are interwoven with nature's power to heal. Here, as in her own family history, are many stories that resist the telling. She pursues these paradoxes fearlessly across the flat, haunted spaces she loves, offering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of the land beneath her feet. Masud combines memoir, nature writing, and literary reflection to explore what can be drawn from these powerful places, and to understand her own experience of complex trauma and post-traumatic stress, as well as grief and loss. A Flat Place is a book that drives to the heart of what it means to experience place bodily and psychologically and the healing properties of literature and landscape.
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Mrs_B
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Pickpick

I completely understand why this was nominated for the women‘s prize for non-fiction. Masud weaves her stories of life searching the countryside in England with her memories from her traumatic childhood in Pakistan.

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KaylasReadingNook
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Pickpick

This was a challenging read about complex trauma. How the author demonstrates her trauma into her teachings and education into her past life is inspiring and interesting. Not everyone with trauma shares the same experiences so having a new perspective is greatly beneficial!

dabbe 🖤🐾🖤 2mo
11 likes2 comments
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AnneCecilie
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Pickpick

Diagnosed with complex PTSD, Masud uses the flat places she visits as a way to deal with that. The flat paces are places of conflict and colonialism. She visits Morecambe Bay, Orford Ness and the Orkney islands and each trip represents a different challenge

I loved her description of the different places that she visited and at times I felt that I was visiting these places along with her

youneverarrived Great review. She definitely takes you there. I love the way it‘s written. 4mo
51 likes1 stack add1 comment
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Hooked_on_books
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Mehso-so

Ultimately, this book didn‘t work for me. While it has some compelling content and some of the writing is beautiful, it‘s written in a stream of consciousness type way that felt chunked together to me. Also, the author tended toward the melodramatic at times, which I never like. And the cover is just awful. It looks like a PowerPoint template. If not for the Women‘s Prize, I likely would have bailed.

dabbe 🖤🐾🖤 5mo
kspenmoll Great review! 5mo
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charl08

I don't want ever to be wholly relaxed, wholly at home, in a world of flowing fresh water built on the parched pain of others. The world itches, and so it should.

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charl08
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Enjoying lazy day with this.

Cathythoughts Enjoy ❤️ 5mo
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charl08
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The famous red-and-white-striped lighthouse had been demolished, only last year. It had stood on the edge of the Ness since 1792. But by 2013, the sea had doggedly eaten its way too far inland, and the lighthouse was decommissioned. Waves lapped at the base of the building. It was time to level it....

Why hadn't the lighthouse simply been left to rot with the other ruins on the Ness...?