Book of Mutter (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

Book of Mutter (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

<i>Writing is how I attempt to repair myself, stitching back former selves, sentences. When I am brave enough I am never brave enough I unravel the tapestry of my life, my childhood.</i> -- from <i> Book of Mutter</i><div><i></i></div><div><i></i><div><i></i><div><i></i><div><i></i>Composed over thirteen years, Kate Zambreno's <i> Book of Mutter </i>is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes -- and dead calm -- of grief. <i>Book of Mutter</i> is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author's searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of her mother's death. The text spirals out into a kind of fractured anatomy of melancholy that comes to contain critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha <i>, </i>Peter Handke, and others. Zambreno has modeled the book's formless form on Bourgeois's <i>Cells</i> sculptures -- at once channeling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space.</div><div><br />Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, <i>Book of Mutter</i> is an uncategorizable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. It is a haunted text, an accumulative archive of myth and memory that seeks its own undoing, driven by crossed desires to resurrect and exorcise the past. Zambreno weaves a complex web of associations, relics, and references, elevating the prosaic scrapbook into a strange and intimate postmortem/postmodern theater. </div></div> </div></div>