Daybook from Sheep Meadow
The Notebooks of Tallis Martinson
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Daybook from Sheep Meadow finds Peter Dimock returning to the breakdown of America’s imperialist history that he started exploring in his groundbreaking previous novel, George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time. In Daybook, Dimock expands on what it means to refute the narrative of American greatness – and what happens once one starts on that path.
Historian Tallis Martinson has grappled for years with the atrocities of the American condition through meditative notebook entries, wherein he has attempted to create a “historical method” that guide’s an individual ‘s personal thought outside the language of empire. However, when words fail him completely, he commits himself to a psychiatric facility, mute and unable to write.
Daybook presents Tallis’ notebook entries, annotated by his brother and editor Christopher Rentho Martinson. Christopher initially follows the entries’ complex guided meditations in hopes of being able to reach Tallis during his visits to the psychiatric facility. Instead, he finds himself immersed in his own family’s implication in the normalized atrocities of his country’s past and present.
An experiment in the capacity of literature to re-lay the trajectory of America’s future, Daybook stages a space wherein the reader can register – and, potentially, remedy – the criminal catastrophe of the American political arena.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dimock (A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family) provocatively weaves history and philosophy into an unorthodox fictional biography. Christopher Martinson has collected all 126 of his older brother Tallis's handwritten notebooks, and annotates the entries as part of his narration. These serve as both source material and stimulus for Christopher's effort to reconnect with Tallis, a renowned historian who has voluntarily committed himself to a psychiatric care facility. Dimock's setup allows him to move fluidly from excerpts of Tallis's study of contemporary war to his disquisitions on the Civil War, John James Audubon, Hieronymous Bosch, and other subjects. In a note, Dimock describes this as "a novel of linguistic dispersion," and his bibliography cites the work of abolitionists, linguists, philosophers, and poets. The juxtapositions are insightful and trenchant, the syntheses often brilliant. Tallis's testimony on the use of drones in the Iraq War—and the Orwellian doublespeak he discovered in Pentagon documents—adds to a tapestry of disillusion and creeping madness ("I believe he suddenly experienced the loss of the sense that he could trust the world he had previously confidently known and helped to shape as a responsible beneficiary and highly regarded narrator and interpreter of American power"). Throughout, Christopher offers juicy, distilled erudition on his brother's life and work. This experiment is a resounding success.
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