Drifts: A Novel - Hardcover

Zambreno, Kate

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593087216 ISBN 13: 9780593087213

Verlag: Riverhead Books, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

“Drifts is a dazzling and enjoyable book. Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup. I've never read truer pages on the subject of pregnancy. No writer has come so close to achieving a total grasp of life: the entanglement of everyday things, a writing project, and a pregnant body, in a single work.” —Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Paris Review, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Esquire, Vulture, and Refinery29

“Reading all Zambreno feels like the jolt one gets from a surprise cut or burn in the kitchen, that sudden recognition that you’re in a body and the body can be hurt.” —Alicia Kennedy, Refinery29

Haunting and compulsively readable, Drifts is an intimate portrait of reading, writing, and creative obsession. At work on a novel that is overdue, spending long days walking neighborhood streets with her restless terrier, corresponding ardently with fellow writers, the narrator grows obsessed with the challenge of writing the present tense, of capturing time itself. Entranced by the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, Albrecht Dürer, Chantal Akerman, and others, she photographs the residents and strays of her neighborhood, haunts bookstores and galleries, and records her thoughts in a yellow notebook that soon subsumes her work on the novel. As winter closes in, a series of disturbances—the appearances and disappearances of enigmatic figures, the burglary of her apartment—leaves her distracted and uncertain . . . until an intense and tender disruption changes everything.

A story of artistic ambition, personal crisis, and the possibilities and failures of literature, Drifts is the work of an exhilarating and vital writer.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kate Zambreno is the author of several acclaimed books including Screen Tests, Heroines, and Green Girl. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction, she teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

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Named one of the Best Books of 2020 by Refinery29



"A lyrical, fragmentary, and heartfelt story about the beauty and difficulty of artistic isolation." -Kirkus Reviews (starred review)



Haunting and compulsively readable, Drifts is an intimate portrait of reading, writing, and creative obsession. At work on a novel that is overdue, spending long days walking neighborhood streets with her restless terrier, corresponding ardently with fellow writers, the narrator grows obsessed with the challenge of writing the present tense, of capturing time itself. Entranced by the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, Albrecht Dürer, Chantal Akerman, and others, she photographs the residents and strays of her neighborhood, haunts bookstores and galleries, and records her thoughts in a yellow notebook that soon subsumes her work on the novel. As winter closes in, a series of disturbances-the appearances and disappearances of enigmatic figures, the burglary of her apartment-leaves her distracted and uncertain . . . until an intense and tender disruption changes everything.



A story of artistic ambition, personal crisis, and the possibilities and failures of literature, Drifts is the work of an exhilarating and vital writer.

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I
 
Sketches of Animals and Landscapes

In the summer of 1907, in a letter to his wife from Paris, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke meditates on three branches of heather placed in a blue velvet-lined pencil box before him on his desk. The splendor of these fragments, which had arrived folded into her previous letter, he has been admiring for days. The poet notes the various tones and textures of the heather, the radiant green flecked with gold like embroidery woven into a Persian rug with violet silk, the complicated autumnal scents within it, the depth, of the grave almost, and yet again wind, tar, turpentine, and Ceylon tea, but also resinous like incense. At this point, his marriage is almost entirely epistolary. His wife, Clara, a sculptor, is back in their farmhouse in Germany, taking care of their young daughter, Ruth. She is no longer able to be the peripatetic artist, keeping her various studios in Paris and Rome, leaving Ruth with her grandparents in the country. Rilke writes to Clara that he is truly ashamed he was not happy when he could have walked in an abundance of this heather, when they lived together for that honeymoon year, noting the flowers of this urban summer—the dahlias and tall gladiolas and red germaniums. It is in these letters that he attempts a prose like the weather he details, language he will lift for his novel that will take him close to a decade to write. To see and to work, he writes to Clara. How different they are. It is in this letter, reflecting on the fragments of heather he had failed to observe when they were waving in fields before him, that Rilke delivers his insight into the impossibility of the day and its relationship to writing: “For one lives so badly, and one comes into the present unfinished, unable, distracted.”
 
In the summer of 2015, I was supposed to be at work on Drifts, a book I had been under contract for almost as long as I had lived in this city, renting the first floor of a shabby Victorian house in a tree-lined neighborhood so remote it was almost a suburb. The title of the book came from a feeling, and I wanted to write through this feeling. Drifts existed in the space of the day, in all the notebooks I filled up. What I really wanted to write was my present tense, which seemed impossible. How can a paragraph be a day, or a day a paragraph? But I couldn’t often exist in the room, or even in this paragraph, now. I found myself always distracted.  
 
The publishing people told me that I was writing a novel, but I was unsure. What I didn’t tell them is that what I longed to write was a small book of wanderings, animals. A paper-thin object, a ghost. Filled with an incandescence toward the possibility of a book, as well as a paralysis. Maybe I was writing a novel, in the Robert Walser sense, his short forms like moods and digressions. “For me the sketches I produce now and then are shortish or longish chapters of a novel. The novel I am writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn apart book of myself.”
 
What is a drift? Perhaps a drift is a sort of form.

For some time, I have been interested in the writing one is doing when one is not writing. All that summer, I email often throughout the day with Anna, a more successful writer, living in a different city. We have both been under contract for our respective novels for several years. Art is time, Anna writes me, a novel especially, it must be slow, it must take the time it needs. All that summer I attempt time. I try not to let the days bleed. I attempt to be in the room, outside of the internet. That summer, along with my daily black journals that accumulate in rows like gravestones, I begin keeping a notebook that I think of as the Drifts notebook, its cover a canary yellow that matches my copy of Walser’s The Tanners, which I read in short increments each season, never finishing.
 
I crane my head now and see the first of the yellow notebooks on the small table across the room, in a pile with other filled and partial journals, legal pads, printed-out notes, manuscript pages, photographs. Inside the yellow notebook I wrote my address and my name, except it was a slightly different version of my last name, which made me feel I had entered the space of fiction. The notebook was for a book called Drifts, but it is a different book from the one I’m trying to write now. I was surprised to find these notes inside the notebook. This Drifts desired to be a detective story, or maybe a murder mystery. Like something out of an Antonioni film. Searching for something lost or missing, but I didn’t yet know who or what.

How summers are spent following my little black terrier, Genet, as he shifts into various dark shapes on the rug or wooden floor, following patterns of light. He paces nervously in the office, waiting at the door, eventually settling for a time on the fake-sheepskin rug under my desk, all these soft spots I plant for him around the house. He does not like to keep still within the office, it isn’t close to any source of sunlight, to any window from which he can look out. To get any thinking done, I must ignore him, his desire to be fed, to play, his pushing the ball into my hand. I feed him my dried mango slices, which I eat so that I can chew on something leathery, chewing as thinking, thinking as chewing. In the morning, after John leaves for the museum, coffee after coffee, the key is not too many cups, and to remember to eat breakfast—granola, yogurt and fruit or toast after toast. The key is to remember to turn off the internet and to allow it to stay off. The key is to try to stay still. The distraction of Genet’s bark. His periodic eruptions at possible intruders. His call and response to Fritz, the absurd blonde Labradoodle next door who yelps from the window of the first floor of the pale yellow colonial. The psychotic burst of the mail slot, my dog’s heart beating inside his small barrel chest. A low growl that builds as he flies through the house, careening around the corner, nails scratching, toward the front window, erupting at another delivery for the apartment upstairs, his sympathetic nervous system that I sponge from, his paranoia and intensity that I share. I see the postman smoking his brown little cigarettes outside of the house. We wave at each other. I suspect he lights one after he visits here. He has seen me in various states of undress, after having been on the couch all day, staring at screens. How so often, when inside, I look at my inbox like an oracle, to remind myself that I still exist.
 
Fragile Fritz. Nietzsche’s nickname. I tried to pet him once. He doesn’t like other dogs or even other humans—a true loner. I also think of the Austrian writer Marianne Fritz, how she stayed inside with her scraps of paper, endlessly writing her dense and increasingly indecipherable body of work. Still, who is romanticized in literature as a hermit, and who, by staying inside, is viewed as simply crazy. The madness of writing versus the madness of not writing. Walser, who went to Waldau not to write, he said, but to be mad.
 
Throw away your notes, the unpublished male novelist advised me, in the depth of my spiritual crisis, the first summer here. This is when I was working on a different book, with the title of the name of a country. I wanted the book, like everything I have attempted these past years, to contemplate literary sadness. But all I had were my notes. Fragments of this book exist in open and wounded states, in notebooks, legal pads, boxes, endless notes and files on my desktop. The male novelist sends me his Notes on Nietzsche written during his undergraduate years, with his anxious...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Riverhead Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593087216
• ISBN 13: 9780593087213
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: RIVERHEAD; https://www.penguin.com/riverhead-overview/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar