December 8, 2015
Many thanks to the editors of Britain’s Review 31 for selecting my book The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far as one of the seven books selected for Review 31’s Best Novels of 2015…along with Marilynne Robinson and Ben Lerner. Editor Jason deYoung even made an exception, because it’s not a novel, exactly. It’s just it’s own entity, and their glowing words are much appreciated!
“I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that I wanted to go and ‘check up on’ after I’ve put it away, but I’ve found myself wanting to do so with The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far. I’ve wanted to check to see if it had changed, whether it’d grown, sprouted something new or if it had caught some debris on it own and was tending to it now like mother to an infant, a monk to a relic. It is just that strange and visceral.”
– Jason de Young
http://review31.co.uk/essay/view/28/fiction-highlights-review-31’s-best-novels-of
“When the call came in to report on our favourite novel for 2015, I didn’t have one. I’d read some fine novels over the past year, but most of them were older. I had, however, read some exceptionally good contemporary short story collections over the course of the year, none more remarkable than Quintan Ana Wikswo’s The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far. “I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that I wanted to go and ‘check up on’ after I’ve put it away, but I’ve found myself wanting to do so with The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far. I’ve wanted to check to see if it had changed, whether it’d grown, sprouted something new or if it had caught some debris on it own and was tending to it now like mother to an infant, a monk to a relic. It is just that strange and visceral.”
Blending myth and science, war and romance, reality and fantasy, Wikswo works an astonishing alchemy with her writing. Her prose is very organic and felt bodily; there’s a kind of earthiness to the stories. The narrative camera is at times so close that we can lose our way in a nest of underbrush with her protagonist or be carried out to sea. The writing is as sparse and as tight as poetry: ‘The mouth is a pocket of wind and wanting, and also of words. It smells of mother licking its young. One tongue or two, accommodating. Just a flip of muscle, a flap of skin there we call a cheek, the sag that goes taut with shrieking.’
What makes The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far unusual is Wikswo’s inclusion of her photography, taken with a 100-year-old military camera filled with ‘battlefield detritus.’ The images are eerie, surreal and murky, with recognisable images often superimposed onto more expressionistic backgrounds. Nearly all are lush in colour with some combination of landscape and manmade object. At times the photographs are obviously related to the prose, but more often they’re abstract dreamscapes, registering mood, colour or tenor. Combining image and prose heightens the sense that as we read we are moving through multiple levels – different states of consciousness, different realities.
Jason DeYoung