Home › Books › To Write as if Already Dead (Rereadings)
To Write as if Already Dead (Rereadings)
by
12/99
Critics' Rating Index
48/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
34/99
Volume of Reviews
14/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
To Write As If Already Dead circles around Kate Zambreno's failed attempts to write a study of Hervé Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. In this diaristic, transgressive work, the first in a cycle written in the years preceding his death, Guibert documents with speed and intensity his diagnosis and disintegration from AIDS and elegizes a character based on Michel Foucault. The first half of To Write As If Already Dead is a novella in the mode of a detective story, searching after the mysterious disappearance of an online friendship after an intense dialogue on anonymity, names, language, and connection. The second half, a notebook documenting the doubled history of two bodies amid another historical plague, continues the meditation on friendship, solitude, time, mortality, precarity, art, and literature. Throughout this rigorous, mischievous, thrilling not-quite study, Guibert lingers as a ghost companion. Zambreno, who has been pushing the boundaries of literary form for a decade, investigates his methods by adopting them, offering a keen sense of the energy and confessional force of Guibert's work, an ode to his slippery, scarcely classifiable genre. The book asks, as Foucault once did, "What is an author?" Zambreno infuses this question with new urgency, exploring it through the anxieties of the internet age, the ethics of friendship, and "the facts of the body" illness, pregnancy, and death.
Reviews
"The author's fans will savor this cascading meditation on what makes writing possible and necessary."
"Drifts was digressive but possessed a lyricism, sense of humor, and passion that justified its fragmentary nature."
"Throughout the text Zambreno weaves in her personal obsessions, pointing out striking and sometimes tenuous parallels between consciousnesses—hers, Guibert's, and Alex Suzuki's—all grasping for connection within an ether of intertextual references, mazy interior monologues, and quotations that speak of one thing but point behind their backs at another ..."
"Her examination of the consequences of structural violence in our intimate lives—powerfully punctuated by recursive anxieties about living as an uninsured or otherwise politically 'dispensable' person in a world that will handily divest itself of responsibility for such people and bodies—stresses (in a phrase lately recited ad infinitum) that the cruelty is the point ..."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!