Zona, Geoff Dyer’s book about Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, reviewed at The Daily Telegraph:
Zona’s subheading insists it’s “a book about a film about a journey to a room”. Literally speaking it is. Tarkovsky’s Stalker forms the foundations. Dyer retraces the cinematography faithfully and beautifully. So beautifully, in fact, that I found it difficult not to start falling again for Tarkovsky. But Zona is also about an author on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “I mean, do you think I would be spending my time summarising the action of a film almost devoid of action if I was capable of writing about anything else?” Dyer writes, as if about to explode.
See also: The Guardian. And in a lovely twist, Dyer, a nominee for Hatchet Job of the Year, reviewed by the eventual winner Adam Mars-Jones at The Spectator.
Meanwhile, an interview with the man himself at Guernica Magazine:
I’m most interested in the book which is completely un-sellable on the basis of a proposal or contract. One of the reasons so many nonfiction books are so boring is because what they’ve done, very diligently, is fulfill the terms of their proposals—they’ve written up their proposal, long-form, and often what this does is then set up a sort of serial deal, where the whole book can essentially be reduced back to the size of the original proposal! What I really like about this book is that the proposal would be turned down instantly: there’s nothing to propose. Nicholson Baker talks about the way in which the most successful nonfiction books are those that can be boiled down into an argument so that everybody can wade in with an opinion without having to undergo the inconvenience of having to read the book itself. The more you can condense it, the better. Malcolm Gladwell is the supreme exponent of this: Blink—oh yeah, I get it! “Blink.” That’s all you need to know.
(pictured above, the UK edition of Zona published by Canongate. Design: Rafaela Romaya / Canongate Art Dept. Photograph: Mosfilm. The book is published by Pantheon in the US)
And in non-Geoff Dyer related news…
A remarkable set of the Paris Review covers at social media site of the moment Pinterest.
And finally…
At The Guardian, Sukhdev Sandhu charts the rise of radical alternative publishers, and talks to some of the contributors to the Zero Books imprint, including Nina Power:
Comments closedThe book still retains a curiously weighty status in comparison to blogs. A book is a snapshot of whatever it was you felt was interesting at that moment, and it’s fixed in aspic, which can have its drawbacks.
There’s an appeal to physical books, particularly short books like most of the Zer0 catalogue, at the moment: the physical form provides some relief from the relentless pressure of the online environment. It’s very difficult to keep one’s attention on online content – the temptation to click away is always there. In conditions where your attention is besieged in that way, short essayistic books, which you can read in one afternoon, come into their own.
