En Abîme: Listening, Reading, Writing. An Archival Fiction is published today by Zero Books:
http://www.zero-books.net/books/en-abme-listening-reading-writing-an-archival-fiction
En Abîme explores listening and reading as creative and critical activities driven by memory and return, reshaped into the present.
The narrator revisits, at different points in time, a number of places in Rome – the Protestant Cemetery sung by Pier Paolo Pasolini in The Ashes of Gramsci, via Appia, the Catacombs – and attaches onto them a series of connections to her archive of poetry, music, literature. The words of Herman Melville in Rome, Pasolini’s verses and films, a number of songs and poems build up a mise en abîme; knots of visions and densities of prose are juxtaposed with sparse moments of stillness, as the book zooms in and out of the archival fiction of a city, morphs into criticism and abstraction, and back into a literary landscape.
En Abîme appears as a trace of the experience that made it, in a contingent present singular.
‘…poetic, incisive, grounded in politics and history yet continually pushing at the edges of what we now consider to be sound. She interrogates notions of music and the shifting experience that is silence with a freshness and coherence that is inspiring’.
David Toop, author of Ocean of Sound, Haunted Weather and Sinister Resonance
‘…compulsive and fast, rushing with you through textual territories that seem spoken, direct and contemporary while being nostalgic – invoking a past that creates the present tense’. Salomé Voegelin, author of Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art
You can read an extensive interview about the book on Earroom:
http://earroom.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/daniella-cascella/
Review copies are available from: maria.barry@o-books.net
en abîme 