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.
Author Hometown: Berlin GER
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 entitled In the Blood.
Reviews:
http://www.andreascrima.com/
KGB Bar Review
NPR Podcast
Lauren Smith in Bookslut
Nicolle Elizabeth in the Brooklyn Rail
Interview by John Kenyon in TIRBD
Kevin Evers @ The Rumpus
“A LESSER DAY is poetic, disturbing, elegiac, visceral, and beautiful. Scrima paints vivid,
detailed memories of places to evoke a web of intimate relationships that emerges
gradually from a temporal fog into shocking, unforgettable clarity.”
—Kate Christensen
“A LESSER DAY is a miraculous memoir intricately woven out of small wonders. Scrima’s is a
world in which nothing is unobserved, nothing unnoticed; everything is fraught with meaning,
however difficult it may be to discern. Few of us have any but the dimmest understanding of the
lives we lead, moment to moment. The bravery and beauty of A LESSER DAY is in the effort to
understand, to make clear, to illuminate even the tiniest gesture. On the surface an elegy for a
father’s death, it ultimately becomes a monument to the human struggle to survive, to remember,
to understand, and to love.”
—Robert Goolrick
“As Andrea Scrima’s A LESSER DAY unfolds, form is repetition: time is day, narrative is place—as both departure
and refuge. And each section a separate movement returns to that moment wherein the narrator watches
the subtle shift of light as perception of time. This book is about observation; the way an artist watches
light change. Scrima’s meditation on loss seeks momentum in image.”
—Rebecca Goodman