Drifts
A Novel
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
“Drifts is a dazzling and enjoyable book. Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup. I've never read truer pages on the subject of pregnancy. No writer has come so close to achieving a total grasp of life: the entanglement of everyday things, a writing project, and a pregnant body, in a single work.” —Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Paris Review, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Esquire, Vulture, and Refinery29
“Reading all Zambreno feels like the jolt one gets from a surprise cut or burn in the kitchen, that sudden recognition that you’re in a body and the body can be hurt.” —Alicia Kennedy, Refinery29
Haunting and compulsively readable, Drifts is an intimate portrait of reading, writing, and creative obsession. At work on a novel that is overdue, spending long days walking neighborhood streets with her restless terrier, corresponding ardently with fellow writers, the narrator grows obsessed with the challenge of writing the present tense, of capturing time itself. Entranced by the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, Albrecht Dürer, Chantal Akerman, and others, she photographs the residents and strays of her neighborhood, haunts bookstores and galleries, and records her thoughts in a yellow notebook that soon subsumes her work on the novel. As winter closes in, a series of disturbances—the appearances and disappearances of enigmatic figures, the burglary of her apartment—leaves her distracted and uncertain . . . until an intense and tender disruption changes everything.
A story of artistic ambition, personal crisis, and the possibilities and failures of literature, Drifts is the work of an exhilarating and vital writer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zambreno's immersive, exciting experiment in autofiction (after Book of Mutter) features a writer setting out to write a book called Drifts. The narrator, beholden to a contract, describes herself "filled with an incandescence toward the possibility of a book." She meditates on the life of Rilke, reads Wittgenstein, and, in photo-studded accounts of walks around New York, patterns her work after those of Robert Walser and W.G. Sebald. But mostly, the narrator describes her time spent not writing: she cares for her dog, Genet; makes notes while on walks; emails her friends; and procrastinates by surfing the internet. Thus, Zambreno offers an enticing chronicle of how a book might actually be written dramatizing how a writer's work affects her life, and vice versa filled with small moments of magic ("Today, after writing about my lost raccoon cat, I spy her"). After the narrator discovers she is pregnant, she turns toward developing a portrait of a writer contending with her own body. Zambreno succeeds at capturing her narrator's experience of time and the unavoidable transformations it brings. The result is a captivating deconstruction of the writer's process that will reward readers in search for meaning.
