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December 21, 2007
Elizabeth Block '90
A Gesture Through Time, Spuyten Duyvil 2005
The book: At once erotic, whirling toward dying, philosophical, and comic, "A Gesture Through Time," 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 lovers' 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.
The author: Elizabeth Block has been writing most of her life, and she also is a filmmaker. Since 1985, she has received numerous awards and grants for her writing in three genres (poetry, fiction, essay writing). Her writing has been published in a variety of journals, it has been broadcast on the radio and it has been performed on stage. Block currently lives in California.
Posted by tobiaslw at December 21, 2007 02:23 PM