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On A Gesture Through Time
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While there are many talented experimental novelists working today, writers who are able to transcend the traditional limitations of the novel in order to present rare states of experience and consciousness, a rarer state of experience and consciousness occurs when an experimental novel is actually fun to read. A Gesture Through Time, Elizabeth Block’s debut, is that rare and sparkling find. Not only is Block’s novel more entertaining than most avant-garde writing, but it gives more pleasure than many mainstream novels from large and small presses alike. Spuyten Duyvil Press, which in recent years has been steadily improving its batting stats, hitting doubles and triples and the occasional home run, has finally hit one clean out of the park....Indeed, if Joyce and Eliot were alive today...then Block’s prose would be the prose that they would be required to write.
Robert Clark Young
(The Brooklyn Rail, September 2005), novelist and author of
One of the Guys
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Elizabeth Block’s A Gesture Through Time is a novel for the new millennium. Deft and funny and wise, it examines authorship, narration, technology, love, and memory, and asks most playfully what it means to tell a story. Always inventing and bravely trying out new strategies, she puts most writers and their sorry pretenses of invention to shame. In the spirit of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, A Gesture Through Time captures the relation of muse and amuse, taking the reader on a spirited, pleasure-filled journey.
MAXINE CHERNOFF
PEN/FAULKNER AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF NUMEROUS BOOKS OF FICTION AND POETRY,
INCLUDING BOP, SOME OF HER FRIENDS THAT YEAR, A BOY
IN WINTER, AND AMONG THE NAMES; CO-EDITOR OF NEW AMERICAN WRITING
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A Gesture Through Time is a work of remarkable ingenuity. With the daring of a poet, Elizabeth Block splices an unexpected montage of elements to tell a story that is as intriguing and immediate as life itself. This meticulously written first novel by Block demonstrates her sophisticated skills as a writer and a vision that expands the possibilities for fiction.
DENISE NEWMAN
poet and author of Human Forest; Danish translator, editor of Five
Fingers Review
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In a novel full of narrative curveballs and ambushes, it still comes as
a shock to turn the page in Elizabeth Block's A Gesture
Through Time and
be confronted with a flip book. But instead of stick figures falling out
of trees or wide receivers going long for a pass, the pages in Gesture reveal
film stills about eccentric 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge's
life.
The flip book works almost on novelty alone, and is a welcome respite from
the sometimes dense material of the novel. But it wouldn't succeed quite
so well if not executed by Block's careful hand. A poet and a filmmaker,
Block is accustomed to playing with genres and expectations. Gesture takes
numerous leaps: through time, through space and (one could argue) through
sanity. It's an obsessive love story of a teenage girl who becomes infatuated
with an older woman and who, over the course of several years, cannot let
go. Eventually, it becomes clear that the object of the narrator's affection
is not a single person but rather an archetype that no lover ever quite
matches. . . . .
Gesture is one of those rare books: an eagerly anticipated avant-garde novel.
It was a finalist back in 1997 in a national novel-in-progress competition
and won an honorable mention last year for the Starcherone Fiction Prize.
Jonathan Messinger
Books Editor, Time Out Chicago
Starred Chicago Reading
event, December 8, 2005
Limited edition cover of A Gesture Through
Time
Art by Donna Cameron, 2005
c
2005 Donna Cameron
