A Lesser Day [Paperback]

Andrea Scrima (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1933132779 | ISBN-13: 978-1933132778 | Publication Date: June 15, 2010 | Edition: 1st

Fiction. When the narrator travels to New York to attend her father's funeral shortly after November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall fell, a period begins in which her hold on reality grows increasingly tenuous. Hiding away in her studio with her father's journals, her paintings building up inch by inch in a fruitless attempt to come to terms with human mortality, she sets about deciphering her father's encoded script. Addressing a continually shifting "you" in a search for emotional understanding initially directed at the author's dead father and then merging into a blur of intimate others, A LESSER DAY explores the mechanisms of memory and suppression in an era of political upheaval. Little escapes the author's scrutinizing eye as she locates meaning in the passage of time as it inscribes itself into the myriad things around us: the mute, insentient witnesses of our everyday existence.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A narrative kept closer than a secret, oozing in slow, soft, whispers ... The work is delicate, yet naked and unapologetic, and our collective consciousness is greater for Spuyten Duyvil publishing this small, wondrous book.  --The Brooklyn Rail

The book's mission is awareness, seeing ... in the end, it is hard not to cheer on a mind so intent on reclaiming meaning from the abandoned, the forgotten, and the mundane. --KGB Bar Lit

How to make sense of a life lived when its contents are scattered across countries and continents? ... Maybe the effort and the concentration remind her of what matters most: people are the places she wants to go. 
--The Rumpus

With its shimmering pictures and elusive narrator, the pleasure of A Lesser Day stems from how it invites readers to see and to think. Even as Scrima keeps us at a distance, she shows us a singular view of the world.  --Bookslut

From the Inside Flap

The East Village of the early eighties; a divided Berlin; Brooklyn approaching the end of the millennium. Alternating between the various addresses of a restless life on two continents, A Lesser Day is a memoir in which part of the story takes place between the lines, untold.

In the freezing studios and working-class flats of Kreuzberg, we meet Sabine from across the bleak courtyard, a sturdy mother of four who disappears one day and whose adolescent daughters gradually grow wild; Martin, the charismatic boy with an alcoholic stepfather and his own hidden streak of cruelty; Ivo, a Croatian car mechanic who returns home to fight in the war as the landlady's nine-year-old son sets about throwing rocks at the windowpanes of his workshop.

When the narrator travels to New York to attend her father's funeral shortly after November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall fell, a period begins in which her hold on reality grows increasingly tenuous. Hiding away in her studio with her father's journals, her paintings building up inch by inch in a fruitless attempt to come to terms with human mortality, she sets about deciphering her father's encoded script. Addressing a continually shifting "you" in a search for emotional understanding initially directed at the author's dead father and then merging into a blur of intimate others, A Lesser Day explores the mechanisms of memory and suppression in an era of political upheaval. Little escapes the author's scrutinizing eye as she locates meaning in the passage of time as it inscribes itself into the myriad things around us: the mute, insentient witnesses of our everyday existence.

 

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 290 pages
• Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil; 1st edition (June 15, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933132779
• ISBN-13: 978-1933132778
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 4.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #176,761 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Andrea Scrima was born in New York City and studied fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, Germany, where she lives and works. "A Lesser Day" is her first book.

Scrima has received numerous awards for her artistic work, including a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Lingen Art Prize, and has exhibited internationally. She was the recipient of a literature fellowship from the Berlin Council on Science, Research, and the Arts and won a 2007 National Hackney Literary Award for "Sisters," a short story from an ongoing collection titled "In the Blood."


Some links to "A Lesser Day":

Publisher's page:
http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/fiction/lesserday.html

Read an extensive interview with Andrea Scrima on the blog "Things I'd Rather Be Doing":
http://tirbd.com/2010/06/andrea-scrima-the-monday-interview/

Read a review in The Brooklyn Rail:
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/04/books/small-wonder

Read a review in KGB Bar Lit Magazine:
http://www.kgbbar.com/lit/book_reviews/a_lesser_day

Book Notes on "A Lesser Day" online at Largehearted Boy:
"On a Musician Friend's Geometrical Fever Dreams and the Separation of the Time and Space Continuum"
http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2010/03/book_notes_andr_8.html

Podcast aired on NPR Radio:
http://berlinstories.org/2009/01/15/andrea-scrima-on-the-old-lady-across-the-hall/

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars immersed in her world, May 20, 2010

By 

Reader "Reader" (NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Lesser Day (Paperback)

I attended Andrea Scrima's reading at KGB , in New York City. I went to see what all the stir was about rippling through the artist community re: Andrea Scrima. The place was packed with standing room only, with fans of Scrima, transfixed by her artist's mind'e eye. Could not put down "A Lesser Day," a close in view of this young artist's life.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, a must read!, May 20, 2010

By 

Amy Bassin "ab" (NYC, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Lesser Day (Paperback)

"A Lesser Day," is such a heart-felt, moving, and personal journey of an artist, from an emotional point of view, as well as, the artist's day-to-day life. The big, the little, the challenges, the struggles, the triumphs! Beautifully written, I just loved this book, as it moves back and forth between time and people to capture the inner and outer details of one's life.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unique writing style, intimate portrayal., June 8, 2010

By 

Wendy Cooper (St, Louis) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Lesser Day (Paperback)

Scrima's book was like nothing else I've read: Her device of using place as the beginning of each memory, shifting between Berlin and New York. Sentences that don't answer all your questions, but create more questions. Precise observations that take considerable time in her head space of the details of her studio, the neighborhood, sparing us nothing when recounting the light, architecture, dirt, mood, weather, psychological states, shifting relationships - all in fragments so richly detailed, it's like seeing the trees clearly in the shifting forest. This is a beautiful book about the life of an artist who lives for making art as if her life depended on it. And it does.