Book of Mutter
£12.00
Kate Zambreno
The first UK edition of Kate Zambreno’s seminal text on writing, photography, memory and grief, originally published by Semiotext(e).
Book of Mutter 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. It is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author’s searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of a mother’s death. The text spirals out into a fractured anatomy of melancholy that includes critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Peter Handke, and others. Zambreno has modelled the book’s formless form on Bourgeois’s Cells sculptures – at once channelling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space.
Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, Book of Mutter is an uncategorisable 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.
‘Kate Zambreno’s Appendix Project and Book of Mutter are meditations on grief, motherhood, and memory alongside and through Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Mourning Diary. These are also books about reading and seeing. To enter them is to be in the company of a writer with a tremendous capacity and gift for questioning, thinking, and feeling. These are extraordinary works.’ – Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes
Book of Mutter and Appendix Project can be purchased together for just £20. Click here if you would like to order the set.
Description
The first UK edition of Kate Zambreno’s seminal text on writing, photography, memory and grief, originally published by Semiotext(e).
Book of Mutter 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. It is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author’s searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of a mother’s death. The text spirals out into a fractured anatomy of melancholy that includes critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Peter Handke, and others. Zambreno has modelled the book’s formless form on Bourgeois’s Cells sculptures – at once channelling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space.
Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, Book of Mutter is an uncategorisable 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.
‘Kate Zambreno’s Appendix Project and Book of Mutter are meditations on grief, motherhood, and memory alongside and through Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Mourning Diary. These are also books about reading and seeing. To enter them is to be in the company of a writer with a tremendous capacity and gift for questioning, thinking, and feeling. These are extraordinary works.’ – Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes
‘Book of Mutter is an intense, original, and fiercely intelligent work. Eschewing the smooth narration of the conventional memoir and its false confidence in the past as a fixed record of truths, Zambreno interrogates her memories of her mother. She circles and prods the pains and pleasures of her child-self. She investigates images and texts, recalled from life and from books, to create a complex web of associations around a woman who has been dead for years, but who lives on as both a secret and a wound. Book of Mutter is that rare text, which dares to face the immense power of the mother.’ – Siri Hustvedt
‘Book of Mutter is an invasive text. Kate Zambreno’s deep attentiveness opens new ways of seeing the work of art in time. Both a tribute to past lives and a philosophy of the present, Book of Mutter is magnetic, heartrending, and visionary.’ – Sofia Samatar
‘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)
Kate Zambreno is the author of ten books, most recently The Light Room, a meditation on art and care, published in the UK by Corsair, along with a reissue of their seminal text Heroines. Tone, a collaborative study with Sofia Samatar, under The Committee to Investigate Atmosphere, was recently published by Columbia University Press. Forthcoming is Animal Studies, a book of zoos and Kafka, as part of the Undelivered Lectures series at Transit Books. They are a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction. Book of Mutter and its companion text of lectures, Appendix Project, are being reissued together by Prototype. Zambreno is at work on a series of books, Realisms, circling around precarity and interiors.
