Modern Aesthetics, Modern Philosophy - General & Miscellaneous

The Gray book

Name: The Gray book
Author: Aris Fioretos
ISBN: 9780804735384

by Aris Fioretos

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Overview

Generally considered the least lively and most bleak of casts, gray is the taint of vagueness and uncertainty. Written with a lead pencil akin to those found in Nabokov, Rilke, Svevo, Poe, and Dickinson, The Gray Book chronicles the vicissitudes of such equivocal articulation - registering the graphite traces it leaves behind but also recording the dwindling span of its life. The book situates itself in a region beyond criticism but this side of literature, characterized by forgetting and finitude, and investigating important yet seemingly inaccessible "gray areas" in texts as old as those of Homer and as recent as those of Beckett. Loosely arranging these literary finds according to a revision of the four elements, The Gray Book distances itself from tradition and treats not water but tears, not fire but vapor, not earth but grain, not air but clouds. Themes and facts previously confined to the realm of quoted texts leak into the narrative itself. The border between fiction and fact slowly dissolves as the book approaches the curious void that the author locates at the heart of "gray literature." Shaped by an omnipresent though increasingly unreliable narrator, The Gray Book may thus ultimately yield a poetics cast in the form of a ghost story.

About the Author, Aris Fioretos

A professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden, Aris Fioretos was educated at Stockholm and Yale Universities. The recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships, most recently from the Swedish Academy and All Souls College, Oxford, he has published several novels and book-length essays in his native Sweden and has rendered the works of Paul Auster, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Vladimir Nabokov into Swedish. His latest, award-winning novel is entitled The Last Greek (2009). Fioretos is also the general editor of the first commented edition of the complete works of Nelly Sachs in German.

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Booknews

An earlier version was published in Swedish in 1994 (Norstedts F<:o>rlag AB, Stockholm). Fioretos is the author of several books, both fictional and scholarly, in his native Sweden. This work is a complex, extended poetic meditation on the color gray, interweaving a vast universe of literary, sensual, linguistic, and metaphorical references around its central theme: "...for gray is when words slide together, and gray is the opulent emptiness we experience when we slowly descend into their teeming confusion, all ears and tears." Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)