June 27, 2015
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Review: ‘The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far’ by Quintan Ana Wikswo
By Kathleen Rooney
Quintan Ana Wikswo’s strange and haunting debut, “The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far” is less like a book of stories and more like a museum installation. Surrounded by and broken up with white space and interspersed with Wikswo’s own dim and spectral photographs, each of the 10 stories in the collection feels crafted into a distinctive object and thoughtfully presented, practically hung on a wall for the audience’s contemplation. This makes for an unconventional reading experience that is as visual as it is verbal.
A former human rights worker, Wikswo identifies as both a writer and a visual artist, and her work in this book and in general blends genres and mediums. The effect she achieves here is not unlike that of the rain in her story “Aurora and the Storm,” which “battered us in unlikely geometries — wet lines of angular momentum” or like the wind: “(I)t found our seams and split them
The stories are lyrical and deliberately repetitive and poetic, making them almost song-like at times. The opening story, “The Cartographer’s Khorovod,” is based on the techniques of the khorovod, which is “an incantatory, ritual story, song, and dance that unfolds in a round or spiral form.”
All books have both text and paratext. The text — the stories, the poems, the novel, the whatever — is surrounded by supplemental material that comprises the paratext — the cover, the dedication, the acknowledgments, etc. Often, this paratext is provided or required by the publisher and plays a secondary role in the book’s reception. But in Wikswo’s book, the text and paratext are equally deliberate and interesting, and are, as befits a cross-genre artist, difficult to separate. The book opens, for instance, with a handwritten inscription stating “this book is dedicated to” above a drawing of a Venn diagram with one circle labeled “Nihilists” and the other “Romantics.”
In a move that exhibits similar care, her acknowledgments consist of no mere list of thanks but are prefaced with the statement, “A coast is a site where sea meets shore, and both are transformed by the encounter.” This serves as both an opportunity for Wikswo to express her gratitude to the places in which she created this book, and as a suggestion for how the book should be read: as a coastline where the boundaries between image and text, real and imaginary, and text and paratext collide and blur
Does it matter when, where and how a work of art was created? Or does the finished creation itself matter exclusively, with the backstory of that creation not meriting inclusion? How readers feel about the answers to those questions will determine how they respond to this book. Wikswo implicitly argues, with the inclusion of her extensive “Notes on Methodology,” that the material circumstances of a work’s production are critical to the work’s intentions and effects
Of the stories, she writes, “All the pieces in this collection were created at sites in the Baltic, New York, and California that have held unique histories during many wars,” explaining that at these sites, she worked with “salvaged military typewriters and broken film cameras manufactured by slave labor during fascist dictatorships.”
Of the images, she says, “Everything in the photographs is achieved in-camera, through old-fashioned mechanical and optical and chemical means,” explaining that the unique effects are a result of working with “an 80- or 100-year-old camera filled with rust, dirt, cracks, and battlefield detritus.”
These notes are a pleasure to read, adding nuance to the stories and photographs, but the texts and images themselves do not require the notes to be appreciated. They read like dispatches from a violent and fragmented past, offering ghostly traceries of the human and natural worlds.
In “My Nebulae, My Antilles,” she writes, “I suspect letters are now so uncommon that anyone encountering them cannot resist the compulsion to touch. It begins with turning the paper over, feeling the paradoxical oily crispness of its skin,” then, separately and in its own two-word paragraph, she adds: “The translucency.” The stories and photographs in this book are similarly uncommon, tempting the audience to explore their translucency and from there to delve into the eerie depths beneath their surfaces.
Kathleen Rooney is the author of the novel “O, Democracy!”
“The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far”
By Quintan Ana Wikswo, Coffee House, 296 pages, $19.95
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