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Zona
on Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker
by Geoff Dyer
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Book Presentation:
In this spellbinding book, the man described by the Daily Telegraph as 'possibly the best living writer in Britain' takes on his biggest challenge yet: unlocking the film that has obsessed him all his adult life. Like the film Stalker itself, it confronts the most mysterious and enduring questions of life and how to live.
About the Author:
Geoff Dyer is the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and three previous novels, as well as nine non-fiction books. Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography's 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E.M. Forster Award. In 2009 he was named GQ's Writer of the Year. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 and was a finalist in 1998. In 2015 he received a Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he is Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California.
Press Reviews:
This is classic Dyer territory - an extended, near-formless work of art. (Word Magazine)
Zona is penned with great linguistic flair, in a non-academic, conversational tone... It turns Zona from film criticism into a stranger, more amusing study and the section on why their journey is like the journey of writing a book is both intellectually neat and rather touching. (Independent on Sunday)
Doesn't so much inject fun into the film's eerie Soviet glamour as find comedy in the gulf between us and our objects of desire (Boyd Tonkin Independent)
Dyer, ever the postmodernist, thrives on the futility of his critical mission...and he duly unleashes a battle between footnotes and central text, relentlessly peppering his Tarkovskian plot pr�cis with beautiful biographical notes. (The Times)
This is a rigorous book, and one that celebrates properly a lifelong devotion to an artistic masterpiece. But it is also entertaining. As such, it is almost revolutionary in form. (Financial Times)
Perennially readable and wonderfully difficult to second-guess (Bookseller)
[Geoff Dyer] can be laugh out loud funny...[Zona] is a work which generates meanings rather than exhausts them by specificity. The loveliness of Dyer's book is that he could write it again in a decade and it would be different again. (Scotland on Sunday)
[Geoff Dyer] shows how writing about film can deliver a sense of adventure. His book offers the satisfaction of a meditation that inhales a much larger world (Nick James Sight and Sound)
One of my favourite of all contemporary writers. (Alain de Botton)
An investigation into everything from faith to knapsacks. Therapy for Dyer, bliss for the reader (The Daily Telegraph)
Dyer is the perfect man for the job of unpicking the complex mysteries of Tarkovsky's Zone. He has a rare talent for writing about high-minded concerns with disarming simplicity. (Observer)
Reading Dyer is akin to the sudden elation and optimism you feel when you make a new friend, someone as silly as you but cleverer too, in whose company you know you will travel through life more vagrantly, intensely, joyfully. (Daily Telegraph)
A restless polymath and an irresistibly funny storyteller, he is adept at fiction, essay and reportage, but happiest when twisting all three into something entirely his own. (New Yorker)
A true original . . . [Dyer] never ceases to surprise, disturb and delight. (William Boyd)
Like the wind that batters Tarkovsky's desolate landscape, Dyer's argument bloweth where is liseth and takes us into unexpected personal areas...[Zona] duplicates the floating, restless way we watch those films that we love deeply. (Literary Review)
Dyer lifts Tarkovsky up to the level of a Homer in the sense that Stalker encompasses history, myth and a fantastical journey that only art can communicate (Noovella)
It's Dyer's ability at moments like this to make pilgrims of his readers and to lead them on a journey in search of truths about love and about the nature of happiness that make Zona such an exhilarating achievement (Sukhdev Sanhu The Guardian)
No writer can flex and stretch in digressive prose more congenially than Dyer...Zona, like Stalker, is a narrative without focus. It shilly-shallies aimlessly but also pricelessly. Therapy for Dyer, bliss for the reader. (The Sunday Telegraph)
There is no contemporary writer I admire more than Dyer, and in no book of his does he address his animating idea - The Only Way Not to Waste Time Is to Waste It - more overtly, urgently, emphatically and eloquently. (David Shields, author of REALITY HUNGER)
A national treasure. (Zadie Smith)
I loved this book. How can it possibly work - a book describing a film, more or less shot by shot? But it triumphantly does - i actually felt suspense, and revelation. And i'd never laugh at Stalker, but i did laugh all the way through this. (Tessa Hadley, author of THE LONDON TRAIN)
Zona is written from a position of undiminished wonder, renewing our faith in the possibilities of cinema and reminding us of the importance of living attentive lives. Saying that Dyer tests our patience is a compliment of the highest order. (We Love This Book)
Few books about film feel like watching a film, but this one does. We sit with Dyer as he writes about Stalker; he captures its mystery and burnish, he prises it open and gets its glum majesty. As a result of this book, I know the film better, and care about Tarkovsky even more. (Mark Cousins, author of THE STORY OF FILM)
Zona is the rare book that respects the mystery of a film without feeling obliged to dismantle it (Evening Standard)
Throughout, the writing is of an aphoristic grace and concision, suffused with humour and a delight to read (Ian Thomson The Independent)
A must-read for those who love the offbeat. (Prospect)
See the publisher website: Canongate
See Stalker (1979) on IMDB ...
> On a related topic:
Andrei Tarkovsky (2011)
a Photographic Chronicle of the Making of The Sacrifice
Subject: One Film > The Sacrifice
Andrei Tarkovsky's Sounding Cinema (2019)
Music and Meaning from Solaris to The Sacrifice
Subject: Director > Andrei Tarkovsky
Costumes for the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky (2015)
by Nelli Fomina
Subject: Director > Andrei Tarkovsky
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