New Review of Damnation in The Quarterly Conversation
A new review of Damnation appears in the issue of The Quarterly Conversation. Thanks to Joe Milazzo for a really great, thoughtful review and to Scott Esposito for running the review.
An excerpt:
Janice Lee’s latest novel, Damnation, may initially present itself as a work of “critical theory” in disguise. A rumination upon cinema—specifically, the collaborations of director Bela Tarr and novelist László Krasznahorkai—the book is more broadly concerned with the experience, in all its torpor and extravagance, of watching films. Though perhaps it is more accurate to say that Lee has performed here a sort of clinical study, demonstrating with a delicate obsessiveness the procedures of a self-medication whose prescription is obsessive film-watching. In actuality, however, this is a book that turns several faces to the reader. There are the faces of the characters that occupy this novel’s diegesis, their features never delineated, but faces that are nevertheless always open in their looking, their anxiety, their defeat, their unaging weariness. And there are those related faces drawn for us in the book’s appendix, which also serves as a record of the author’s visions (not purely imaginary) of these same characters. Construed as either ekphrasis or exorcism, Damnation impresses most as portrait of spiritual crisis, albeit one that is not colored by any theology, any moral imperative, or any transcendence.
