|
|
Fiction
Non-Fiction
Poetry
Film
Art
MEB
Authors
Press
Events
Distribution
Booksense
Contacts
|
A Gesture Through Time
by Elizabeth
Block
ISBN 1-933132-13-2 $14.00 US
| $17.95 CAN 280 pages
Find the book on
Amazon >
Gesture
is a commanding novel, one that, in its nonlinear
structure, allows Block to inject the
energy of human emotion into our
ever-expanding juggernaut of steel, light, and technology.
To boot, in the
enduring materiality of its presence and its playful formal invention, Gesture
sets itself apart as an equally enduring piece of metafiction that
recognizes,
then explodes,
the boundaries of the medium. American
Book Review/ Matt Samet
While there are many talented experimental novelists
working today,
writers who are able
to transcend the traditional limitations of the
novel in order to present rare states of experience
and consciousness,
a rarer state of experience and consciousness occurs when an
experimental
novel is actually fun to read. A Gesture
Through Time, Elizabeth Block’s debut, is that rare
and sparkling find. Not only is Block’s novel more
entertaining than most avant-garde
writing,
but it gives more pleasure than many mainstream novels from
large and small presses alike.
Spuyten Duyvil Press, which in recent
years has been steadily improving its batting stats,
hitting doubles
and triples and the occasional home run, has finally hit one clean out
of the park.
...... Indeed,
if Joyce and Eliot were alive today, celebrating literature by
taking film cameras apart,
celebrating
stream-of-consciousness by
dictating their love of technology into digital recorders,
and
celebrating sex by showing us what the lesbians are doing behind the
steel plant, then Block’s
prose would be the prose
that they would be
required to write. Robert
Clark Young, The Brooklyn Rail
A
Gesture Through Time is
a work of remarkable
ingenuity. With the daring of a poet,
Elizabeth Block splices an unexpected montage of elements to tell a
story that is as
intriguing and immediate as life itself. This meticulously written
first novel by Block
demonstrates her sophisticated skills as a writer and a vision that
expands the
possibilities for fiction. Denise Newman (author of Human
Forest, Apogee Press; Editor and Translator)
Elizabeth
Block’s A
Gesture Through Time is a novel for the new millennium.
Deft and funny and wise, it examines
authorship, narration, technology, love,
and memory, and asks most playfully
what it means to tell a story. Always
inventing and bravely trying out new strategies, she puts most writers
and
their sorry pretenses of invention to shame. In
the spirit of Stern’s Tristram
Shandy, A Gesture Through Time
captures the relation of muse and amuse, taking the
reader on a spirited,
pleasure-filled journey. Maxine Chernoff
Elizabeth Block’s
debut
novel, A Gesture through Time
(written under fiscal sponsorship
of Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco,
selected as a 1997 Heekin Foundation first
novel fellowship finalist, short-listed
with an honorable mention for the 2004 Starcherone
fiction prize, and the
recipient of a Djerassi Resident Artists Program Tread of Angels
fellowship) is
one of the most inventive narratives in contemporary literature.
At once erotic,
whirling
toward dying, philosophical, and comic, it explores an
obsession
with bodies lost in love and in death, and
the inability to distinguish between an absent lover
and an absent parent in
memory. The tale’s abstract and meticulous language imagines
lost bodies in the
wake of ruptured optics and indeterminate perceptions.
It begins in a
Detroit
steel factory, where a forbidden love affair ignites. Magnitude
Hortense
Zappa,
a worker, seduces the narrator, a teenage heir to the steel factory.
When the
steel
factory owner is killed by one of his workers, the love
affair abruptly
ends, leaving a wasteland
of unresolved emotion. The narrator’s own identity is
only slowly revealed, as the lovers face
their
affair 20 years later, when they cross
paths at a San Francisco film festival.
Through
innovative
narrative structure, the story offers multiple points of view,
ambiguous
sexual
and romantic perspectives, cinematic scenarios, love letters, case
history
notes,
dramatic dialogues, unusual film history,
textual
flipbooks, and
unreliable memories. The
story traces the lover’s shifting
identities, and the
psychological landscape where
conscious and unconscious associations of
loss
and love intermingle. Until their eventual
reunion, the lovers’ compulsions
unravel through their constant inability to be in the same
place at the same
time, whether in actual geographical space, the space of memory, or
in the
space of their conflicting obsessions with sight and sound.
|