Avoid the Day
A New Nonfiction in Two Movements
-
- $7.99
-
- $7.99
Publisher Description
"Avoid the Day truly seems to me to push nonfiction memoir as far as it can go without it collapsing into a singularity and I am at a loss for words. You are just going to have to read it." –Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk
A surreal, high-wire act of narrative nonfiction that redefines the genre, Avoid the Day is part detective story, part memoir, and part meditation on the meaning of life—all told with a dark pulse of existential horror. What emerges is an unforgettable study of mortality and the artist’s journey.
Seeking to answer the mystery of a missing manuscript by Béla Bartók, and using the investigation to avoid his father’s deathbed, award-winning magazine writer Jay Kirk heads off to Transylvania, going to the same villages where the “Master,” like a vampire in search of fresh plasma, had found his new material in the folk music of the peasants. With these stolen songs, Bartók redefined music in the 20th Century. Kirk, who is also seeking to renew his writing, finds inspiration in the composer’s unorthodox methods, but begins to lose his tether as he sees himself in Bartók’s darkest and most personal work, the Cantata Profana, which revolves around the curse of fathers and sons.
After a near-psychotic episode under the spell of Bartók, the author suddenly finds himself on a posh eco-tourist cruise in the Arctic. There, accompanied by an old friend, now a documentary filmmaker, the two decide to scrap the documentary and make a horror flick instead—shot under the noses of the unsuspecting passengers and crew. Playing one of the main characters who finds himself inexplicably trapped on a ship at the literal end of the world, alone, and under the influence of the midnight sun, Kirk gets lost in his own cerebral maze, struggling to answer his most plaguing question: can we find meaning in experience?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kirk (Kingdom Under Glass) casts about for some subject to distract himself as his father lies dying, in this uneven memoir. He lands on B la Bart k (1881 1945), the Hungarian composer who wrote his Third String Quartet in nearby Waterbury, Vt. In peripatetic prose, Kirk devotes the first "movement" of his ragged narrative to his quest to reconstruct the story of the autograph manuscript of Bart k's musical piece. Along the way, his travels take him to Transylvania and Philadelphia, Pa., in search of Otto Albrecht, the man who discovered the manuscript in a bank safe; the score now resides in the University of Pennsylvania's Music Library. Here he shifts gears into his second movement, a quirky, seemingly tangential story of his trip to the Arctic Circle with his friends, where he avoids the guilt of knowing the relief he'll feel when his father dies ("if only because I know how much easier it will be once there is only one of us around"). Kirk's narrative disintegrates into an emotional swamp where one moment he's obsessing over his hangovers and the next he's getting misty-eyed over his father's "yolky, barely animate eyes," as he talks to his father via Skype. Kirk's meandering memoir stalls in both of its movements, never quite connecting the themes.
