A Gesture Through Time

	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.

Fiction

Non-Fiction

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.