Night

by Etel Adnan

Overview

Etel Adnan’s evocative new book places night at its center to unearth memories held in the body, the spirit and the landscape. This striking new book continues Adnan’s meditative observation and inquiry into the experiences of her remarkable life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643620596
Publisher:	Nightboat Books
Publication date:	07/27/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Born in 1925 in Beirut, ETEL ADNAN has written more than a dozen books of poetry, fiction, and essays. A two-volume collection, To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader, was published in 2014. She is a recipient of a PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award, the California Book Award, a Lambda Book Award, and a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. She lives in Paris and Sausalito, California.

What People are Saying About This

Negar Azimi

“There are few lives that have charted the dislocations, tectonic shifts, passions, and innumerable heartbreaks of the modern Arab world more thoroughly than Etel Adnan… She is a writer of searing, sometimes surrealist heights.”

Editorial Reviews

A meditative heir to Nietzsche's aphorisms, Rilke's Book of Hours and the verses of Sufi mysticism, Night is an intricate thread of reflections on pain and beauty…Adnan's language summons transcendent experiences…Adnan's collection is "a cosmic phenomenon," to borrow another phrase from the book, "elevating us far above our daily condition."

The New York Times Book Review - Benjamin Hollander

08/15/2016
Renowned Lebanese-American writer Adnan (To Look at the Sea Is to Become What One Is) maps consciousness in a book-length poem that explores night in all its permutations. Though she is more elliptical and fragmentary here—and less narrative-driven or referential—than in previous work, these poems engage in a daring, meditative exploration of perception and her own experiences. Adnan does this with a courageous interiority that becomes universal as the text unfolds. Memory is a particularly notable leitmotif as it relates to identity, whether personal or collective. “I measure my memory of things, but not memory itself, as the present is also overflowing,” she writes. These internal and societal memories lend themselves to queries about history, landscape, and the nature of consciousness. Adnan posits that memory is not a “storage room. It’s not a tool for being able to think, it’s thinking, before thinking.” As the book progresses, memory becomes increasingly knotted with loss and mortality: “It was said that people mattered, which we did, and they lost their shine.” Adnan never provides clear answers, but this prevents her wide-ranging assertions from becoming didactic; her evocative imagery and interwoven repetitions serve to create another memory—one that will linger with the reader long after the text’s conclusion. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Trained in philosophy, Beirut-born author/activist Adnan blends a meditation on the meaning of memory with memories themselves, dredged up from a long life. And surely night, her setting here, is the time for such dredging. Adnan rigorously asserts that “reason and memory move together.” But she argues that “a remembered event is a return to a mystery,” and her writing is eye-openingly lush, gorgeous, even surreal (“waves of roses are blanketing memory”), showing us the mind at work on its unstructured, uncertain edges. The epigrammatic ending, “Conversations with my soul” (“Why are we lonelier when/ together”), will feed even those who don’t typically read poetry. VERDICT A good way for sophisticated readers to recall why they first loved verse.”—Library Journal

From the Publisher

10/15/2016
Trained in philosophy, Beirut-born author/activist Adnan blends a meditation on the meaning of memory with memories themselves, dredged up from a long life. And surely night, her setting here, is the time for such dredging. Adnan rigorously asserts that "reason and memory move together." But she argues that "a remembered event is a return to a mystery," and her writing is eye-openingly lush, gorgeous, even surreal ("waves of roses are blanketing memory"), showing us the mind at work on its unstructured, uncertain edges. The epigrammatic ending, "Conversations with my soul" ("Why are we lonelier when/ together"), will feed even those who don't typically read poetry. VERDICT A good way for sophisticated readers to recall why they first loved verse.

Library Journal