Customer Reviews

Where I Stay

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Zornoza's Where I Stay is a difficult book to describe, loosely following the story of a young, possibly drug-addicted drifter as he moves from place to place. The word I keep coming back to is "beautiful." The physical book itself is beautiful, a slender, rectangular volume with a different photograph every other page. The story is told as much through disconnected images as it is through text. That being said, the text is also beautiful, and while it's sometimes difficult to thread together a consistent story, each day stands alone as a haunting and sometimes sublime moment in the narrator's life.

I sometimes struggle with so-called "experimental fiction," as so much of it forces purposeless artifice upon the reader. Not so with this book. While Where I Stay is nontraditional, it is never unnatural. In fact, it seems to strip away all the conventions of literature in order to get at the heart of a character.

This portrayal of an American outsider does have its moments of fear or cruelty, but what I loved most was the general kindness shown by all the people he meets. Whether other drifters, drug addicts, a Mormon family at a campground, temporary coworkers at a factory, a waitress at a diner, or a man picking up hitchhikers, there is so much warmth (even if in simple, small gestures) shown to the boy. Unlike so many other stories about drifters and outsiders, this is NOT about a boy who nobly struggles against a world that is keeping him down, but, rather, it's about a world that is patiently holding the door open, waiting for his return.

WHERE I STAY, gimme a break. Andrew Zonorza's handsome book -- & its very bookness sticks (I mean this as a compliment) in my craw; it's some indefinable compendium of photo album, travel diary, & prayer journal-- but, whatever, WHERE I STAY stays: now on the bedside table & now among the oh-so-important stuff of my desktop. I've caught the virus, Zornoza's special strain of American wanderlust. Every other page here presents a photo of some bleak-scape of these ragtag States, in most of which (an exception is the opening shot, desert under clouds) nature has been roughly boxed & girdered, just as the human faces in them tend to forced smiles. Under these photos run some bruising thought in italics, & on the facing page appears a block of print, relating some incident out of a life on the run. Incidents, indeed, accumulate: here a thumping by the cops, there a sister's near-suicide. But nothing escapes the nebulous, lending poignance to the opening declaration: "I want you to know how it was with me." The central irony is that WHERE I STAY never stays anywhere long, & a momentary prayer at a highway overlook above the Pacific in no way indicates the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny. The speaker himself remains unfulfilled, never more than a young man strapped for cash, & his people's gestures, his prose itself, suffers from flatness. I for one could've used more of the pyrotechnics, both verbal & psychological, that distinguished Kerouac, a companion spirit on Zornoza's road. Yet Kerouac never gave his texts over so wholeheartedly to pictures, he never risked a meditation that so combined staring & murmurs, in considering "the cracks in the country," & so never brought off an odyssey of such thorny, idiosyncratic beauty. Zornoza's introduction cites the Depression photography of Walker Evans, but a more compatible sensibility seems to me to be Robert Frank & his street portraiture in THE AMERICANS. Indeed, speaking of compliments, I can think of none sweeter for WHERE I STAY than Kerouac's list of the qualities he found in Frank: "agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy."

This is an cryptic collection of random thoughts, experiences, and photographs of the author's fictional journey through the Western US and Mexico. This definitely isn't the scenic route: Zornoza's travels take him to the edge of urban life, mainly concentrating on the rough roads and deserted highways that have been left in the past by time and progress. The landscape is grey, gritty, and jagged: much like the words he chooses to describe his interactions and his reactions to it all.




His observations are sometimes funny, sometimes tense, and often a bit obscure. You get the impression that he has x-ray vision and sees beneath the surface of the locations, as well as the hardened exteriors of the people he meets. He encounters the most diverse group of people imaginable, all lingering on the outskirts of city and suburban life, some intentionally and some without choice. The black and white photographs heighten the sense of distance and reminded me of a Dust Bowl migration. There's sadness within it all, yet the traveller continues. Much like an epic quest, he keeps pursuing that which he cannot identify.




"There are cracks in the country-in its families and highways, houses and rivers, factories, cellar windows, truck stops, in the sounds of chattering televisions, in the plexiglass booths of pay phones by bus stations, in the crushed glass of parking lots..."





"The prairie was my cellar door. I had removed everyone I knew or the people had removed themselves. I replaced them all with a vast plateau, then mountains, dry desert, broken pieces of landscape that didn't quite fit together. I found people in the cracks."


Zornoza's gift in this collection is the little surprises he throws out amid the descriptions of the raw landcape. In his diary-like entries, he may explain what happened and where, but he may also through out a mysterious phrase: "because if someone was making a movie of her, the movie would not be good. She was a bad actress, but there was no movie, there was no acting." I really enjoyed the photographs but more the pictures his words composed. Sparse, with no unnecessary details or dialogue. An excellent collection....It reminded me somewhat of Sam Shepherd's Day Out of Days.

This book is a beautiful piece of art. It mixes prose and photographs and snippets that all seem to tell their own story beyond being masterfully woven together as one. Its format and brevity offer a sense of space that creates depth and feeling beyond the obvious, and adds to the journey. It stays with you once you have finished, like only the best of books and memories do. I found Where I Stay to be a genuinely beautiful and poetic piece of literature.

First let me start by saying I know the author. We used to work with each other back in the day when he was in tech in San Francisco. I recall stories of Andy hitch hiking back and forth from the coast to University during summers. I'll admit that both of these experiences tainted my perception a bit as I read the book.

Having said that on to the review : I found the book beautiful and haunting. The language has a lyrical quality in its descriptions of the details of life on the road. I found the lucid observations at odds with my perception of nameless individual who wanders through the West in the fringes of dark characters who live on the road. The transient nature of the story is reinforced by the short vignettes as traveler moves from western point to western point. Often long distances apart with many unknown details in between

Each story is off set by a photograph, which are in and of themselves intriguing in their own right, they are stark sometimes a bit melancholy. I found myself wondering at times if they were part of the story opposite the page or a journey all to themselves. Lastly as I followed the crumbs of the nameless character through the West, always the West, I wondered why the West?

Most of all I think I enjoyed this book because it made me consider my own travels in the West. I've driven thousands of miles throughout the arid land landscapes this book wanders through, but under my own control in my own car, most often with my family in tow. Such a different experience than the traveler in Where I Stay. I think maybe once or twice I peered into the dark corners that Zornoza explores but thankfully only briefly.