Fiction
$16.00 US | $16.00 CAN 293 pages
Buy the book at SPD>
A Lesser Day is poetic, disturbing,
elegiac, visceral, and
beautiful. Scrima paints vivid,
detailed memories of places to evoke a web of intimate relationships that emerges
gradually from a temporal fog into shocking, unforgettable clarity.
Kate Christensen, author of In the Drink, The Great Man, and Trouble; winner of the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award
detailed memories of places to evoke a web of intimate relationships that emerges
gradually from a temporal fog into shocking, unforgettable clarity.
Kate Christensen, author of In the Drink, The Great Man, and Trouble; winner of the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award
The East
Village of the early eighties; a divided Berlin; Brooklyn approaching
the end of the millennium.
Alternating between the various addresses of a restless life on two continents, A Lesser Day is a
memoir in which part of the story takes place between the lines, untold.
In the freezing studios and working-class flats of Kreuzberg, we meet Sabine from across the bleak
courtyard, a sturdy mother of four who disappears one day and whose adolescent daughters gradually
grow wild; Martin, the charismatic boy with an alcoholic stepfather and his own hidden streak of cruelty;
Ivo, a Croatian car mechanic who returns home to fight in the war as the landlady’s nine-year-old
son sets about throwing rocks at the windowpanes of his workshop.
Alternating between the various addresses of a restless life on two continents, A Lesser Day is a
memoir in which part of the story takes place between the lines, untold.
In the freezing studios and working-class flats of Kreuzberg, we meet Sabine from across the bleak
courtyard, a sturdy mother of four who disappears one day and whose adolescent daughters gradually
grow wild; Martin, the charismatic boy with an alcoholic stepfather and his own hidden streak of cruelty;
Ivo, a Croatian car mechanic who returns home to fight in the war as the landlady’s nine-year-old
son sets about throwing rocks at the windowpanes of his workshop.
When the narrator
travels to New York to attend her
father’s funeral shortly after November 9, 1989,
the day the Berlin Wall fell, a period begins in which her hold on reality grows increasingly tenuous.
Hiding away in her studio with her father’s journals, her paintings building up inch by inch in a fruitless attempt
to come to terms with human mortality, she sets about deciphering her father’s encoded script. Addressing a
continually shifting “you” in a search for emotional understanding initially directed at the author’s dead father and
then merging into a blur of intimate others, A Lesser Day explores the mechanisms of memory and suppression in
an era of political upheaval. Little escapes the author’s scrutinizing eye as she locates meaning in the passage of
time as it inscribes itself into the myriad things around us: the mute, insentient witnesses of our everyday existence.
the day the Berlin Wall fell, a period begins in which her hold on reality grows increasingly tenuous.
Hiding away in her studio with her father’s journals, her paintings building up inch by inch in a fruitless attempt
to come to terms with human mortality, she sets about deciphering her father’s encoded script. Addressing a
continually shifting “you” in a search for emotional understanding initially directed at the author’s dead father and
then merging into a blur of intimate others, A Lesser Day explores the mechanisms of memory and suppression in
an era of political upheaval. Little escapes the author’s scrutinizing eye as she locates meaning in the passage of
time as it inscribes itself into the myriad things around us: the mute, insentient witnesses of our everyday existence.
Clarice
Lispector has said that
the approach to anything comes about gradually and
agonizingly, and that’s exactly what Andrea Scrima does in A Lesser Day. Her unnamed
narrator, an American artist living in Berlin, attempts to ‘turn my attention to this moment,
try to comprehend its immediacy, to trust in its reality; I tell myself that this is the present,
this moment and no other.’ Trying to come to grips with her father’s recent death, she
waits ‘for these twirling bits of thought to slowly settle down at the bottom of the jar,’ and,
in the process, takes us along on a patient and enriching journey of discovery and reconciliation.
Tsipi Keller, author of Jackpot and Retelling
agonizingly, and that’s exactly what Andrea Scrima does in A Lesser Day. Her unnamed
narrator, an American artist living in Berlin, attempts to ‘turn my attention to this moment,
try to comprehend its immediacy, to trust in its reality; I tell myself that this is the present,
this moment and no other.’ Trying to come to grips with her father’s recent death, she
waits ‘for these twirling bits of thought to slowly settle down at the bottom of the jar,’ and,
in the process, takes us along on a patient and enriching journey of discovery and reconciliation.
Tsipi Keller, author of Jackpot and Retelling
A Lesser Day is a miraculous memoir
intricately woven out of small wonders. Scrima’s is a
world in which nothing is
unobserved, nothing unnoticed; everything is fraught with meaning,
however
difficult it may be to discern. Few of us have any but the dimmest
understanding of the
lives we lead, moment to moment. The bravery and beauty of
A Lesser Day is in the
effort to
understand, to make clear, to illuminate even
the tiniest gesture. On the surface an elegy for a
father’s death, it
ultimately becomes a monument to the human struggle to survive, to
remember,
to
understand, and to love.
Robert
Goolrick, author of The End of the
World as We Know It and A
Reliable Wife; winner of the NAIBA Award for Novel
of the Year 2009
As Andrea
Scrima's A Lesser Day
unfolds, form is repetition: time is day, narrative is place—as both
departure
and refuge. And each section a separate movement returns to that moment wherein the narrator watches
the subtle shift of light as perception of time. This book is about observation; the way an artist watches
light change. Scrima’s meditation on loss seeks momentum in image.
Rebecca Goodman, author of The Surface of Motion
and refuge. And each section a separate movement returns to that moment wherein the narrator watches
the subtle shift of light as perception of time. This book is about observation; the way an artist watches
light change. Scrima’s meditation on loss seeks momentum in image.
Rebecca Goodman, author of The Surface of Motion
Andrea
Scrima
Andrea Scrima was born in New York City and studied fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in New
York and the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, Germany, where she lives and works. A Lesser Day
is her first book. Scrima has received numerous awards for her artistic work, including a
grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Lingen Art Prize, and has exhibited internationally.
She was the recipient of a literature fellowship from the Berlin Council on Science, Research, and
the Arts and won a 2007 National Hackney Literary Award for Sisters, a short story from an
ongoing collection titled In the Blood.
www.andreascrima.com
Andrea Scrima was born in New York City and studied fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in New
York and the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, Germany, where she lives and works. A Lesser Day
is her first book. Scrima has received numerous awards for her artistic work, including a
grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Lingen Art Prize, and has exhibited internationally.
She was the recipient of a literature fellowship from the Berlin Council on Science, Research, and
the Arts and won a 2007 National Hackney Literary Award for Sisters, a short story from an
ongoing collection titled In the Blood.
www.andreascrima.com