Review of Zona by Geoff Dyer

My review of Zona by Geoff Dyer runs today at The Barnes & Noble Review.

A lot of Dyer-y goodness here, but on the whole not the best book.

Toward the middle of Zona, Geoff Dyer’s book-length treatment of Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, the author quotes the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The passage, taken from the obscure theorist’s intensely intimidating, 700-page Phenomenology of Perception, is direct and affecting, as though it were written by Kafka. It reads in part, “once I was a man, with a soul and a living body and now I am no more than a being…. I hear and see, but no longer know anything…. I now live in eternity.”

Dyer is mining Merleau-Ponty for insight into what schizophrenia might feel like, which in turn offers insight into what the three protagonists of Stalker must be feeling as they cross over into “the Zone,” a depopulated, militarily guarded, surreal landscape that seems to hold the truth of existence within it. Dyer’s invocation of Merleau-Ponty shows us why he has become a leading, celebrated critic/artist: he speaks eruditely about the most challenging of subjects in an Everyman’s language. He never condescends, and he’s unpretentious, but he gives readers the impression that they are receiving the finest insight available. For the past two decades he has delivered subtle, acute reflections on art in an original, engaging voice, actively pioneering a mode of writing that blends autobiography, criticism, and travel narrative. In this hybrid genre Dyer stands alongside writers as varied as Nicholson Baker, John Berger, and Roland Barthes, their work all flowing out of the insight that all art is really commentary on other art.

Dyer has written a whole lot of commentary, and some of it is indeed art. . . .

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