Damnation

9780985508579
144 pages
October 2013
Penny-Ante Editions

Reviews:

No technique of cinema is as royal and as risky as the Long Take—audacious in its promise of unified time and space, terrifying in what that might imply. Inspired by the films of Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr, famous for his long take, and the novels and screenplays of Tarr’s great collaborator László Krasznahorkai, Janice Lee’s Damnation is both an ekphrasis and confession, an obsessive response, a poetic meditation and mirror on time; time that ruthlessly pulls forward with our endurance; time unleashed from chronology and prediction; time which resides in a dank, drunk, sordid hiss of relentless static.

As declared in Tarr’s film Damnation, “All stories are about disintegration.”

“That a film or a series of films is inspirative of a literary work of the most poetic and sophisticated kind is a rare phenomenon. Janice Lee’s book is the meeting point of two sensitivities of the finest. One is for the most desperate conditions of life in its objectivity, the other is for the most sublime, even divine spiritual reflection of this life. Lee’s Damnation is a beautiful variation on these themes that are at the depth of every film of Béla Tarr.”
– András Bálint Kovács

“Damnation is a crucial node in contemporary ekphrasis, an inspired contribution to the art of slow seeing, and a document of cinematic obsession. Here Janice Lee conjures an alien, allegorical world that hovers just next to ours, a world which both repels and invites our visitation. She seeds her scenes with countless knockout sentences, whose lush music complicates her project’s austerity.”

– Maggie Nelson

“Like its image of a furtive Holy Book that drives its bearers mad, Janice Lee’s Damnation hovers with remarkable grace between the sublime states of faith and terror. The graceful immediacy with which she navigates frame after frame of struggling humans caught up in the veils of darkness, thunder and silence, and moral duty bears resemblance to Saramago’s The Cave or McCarthy’s Child of God, though perhaps even more haunted, stripped to bone. “Anything that God takes part in is the most horrific thing you’ve ever imagined,” she writes, and then holds the reader in that vast anticipation, with mesmerising results.”

– Blake Butler

“[A] breathtakingly austere and wondrously lurid novel of the endless now that comes before an unknowable future…”
– Nicholas Grider, Lemon Hound

“A prose exploration of suffering and time, Janice Lee’s latest collection Damnation moves with poetic elegance and intensity… Damnation is persistence.”
– Sueyeun Juliette Lee, The Constant Critic

“Janice Lee’s Damnation reminds us that any ultimate attempt to sculpt time will only ever be penultimate. The cinema of time waits, despite the filmic clocks of our souls, ‘for none itself.’”
– Jon Wagner, from the Introduction

“Perhaps this is less ekphrasis or conceptual writing than a new and novel-form of concrete? This is exactly the project that Balzac and Flaubert articulated at the dawn of modernism; they called it the writing of stone.”
– Christine Wertheim, Bomb