Kate Zambreno is the author of the novels Green Girl and O Fallen Angel as well as the nonfiction Heroines and Book of Mutter (both published by Semiotexte(e)).
The composition of this book requires the reader to participate in
constructing links, noticing patterns, and making meaning; it is
what Barthes would call a 'writerly text,' welcoming the reader
into its many entrances and possibilities. Zambreno's work is an
exercise in semiotics, a study of meaning-making, for things that
seem intimate, foundational, and basic to being human: history,
memory, mother, mourning.—Publishers Weekly, (starred review)
Above all, Book of Mutter is a work of tone; it expresses
a failure to transcend grief, written from a place of guilt and
shame, in halting and inarticulate gestures...Writing may not
change anything, may not heal or even console—but, like
Bourgeois's Cells, it creates a space in which formlessness,
pain and chaos are enclosed and held like holy relics in a
church.—Jenny Hendrix, Times Literary Supplement
The book is relentless in its search for meaning and its
simultaneous refusal of simplistic acts of closure. Even its
structure seems designed to reflect pain intermittently avoided and
confronted. Zambreno places her memories into a kind of assemblage
piece, where the form shifts with its underlying emotions.—Mattilda
Bernstein Sycamore, Bookforum
Book of Mutter is ultimately a self-consciously unsentimental
yet deeply moving book. The distance of its aesthetic styling
belies an intense vulnerability and love that emerges through a
number of affecting details: her father's handwriting continuing
her mother's gardening journal, memories of 'fraught yet tangy'
meatloaf, a cream-colored dress with flowers that almost pains the
narrator to mention. In a craft lecture reproduced in
Semiotext(e)'s magazine Animal Shelter, Zambreno writes, 'All
I want is a literature both tender and grotesque.' With Book
of Mutter, she finds it.—Alexander Pines, Bomb Magazine
Among its many concerns—the death of her mother, grief,
autobiography, photography, memory—are the conventions of
book-making itself: It seems as invested in unforming itself as it
is in forming itself, and the result exists outside of any of the
familiar expectations of genre.—T. Clutch Fleischmann, The Brooklyn
Rail
The slim book of bristling fragments is heavy but moves swiftly, as
if laid down in one long fever dream.—Nate Lippens, Queen Mob's Tea
House
As with all her books, Zambreno's sharp and stylish intellectual
masonry, her careful gathering of evidence, is a kind of
(intentionally) incomplete catharsis. She collects anecdotes like
novelist David Markson, but unlike him—he of the impersonal (and
emotionally devastating) story—she builds an altar to her own past,
these anecdotes both personal and yes, sometimes political.—Amber
Sparks, The Fanzine
Barthes, Handke, Louise Bourgeois join the chorus of citations
scattered like waymarks through this mournful, fragmentary text,
which dwells around, without answering – as though the attempt were
the only answer possible—the question, which in the text is posed
without a question mark: 'What does it mean to write what is not
there. To write an absence.'—Adrian Nathan West, Review 31
Mutter is unapologetically intellectual, and unapologetically
bodily. But while this reader enjoys an intertextual puzzle as much
as the next, I found the most compelling threads
within Mutter were those bearing witness to the ordinary;
sites of lament and also startling beauty.—The Lifted Brow
Kate Zambreno's Book of Mutter is an elegy, an archive, a
palimpsest of fragmented memory...It's as if the book's language
has broken with the weight of sorrow.—Anne Yoder, The Millions
The distance of its aesthetic styling belies an intense
vulnerability and love that emerges through a number of affecting
details: her father's handwriting continuing her mother's gardening
journal, memories of 'fraught yet tangy' meatloaf, a cream-colored
dress with flowers that almost pains the narrator to
mention.—Claire Marie Healy, Another Magazine
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