The Gray book
By: Aris Fioretos.
Series: Meridian, crossing aesthetics; Meridian (Stanford, Calif.)
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 151
Subjects: Aesthetics, Modern
Description: Generally considered the least lively and most bleak of casts, gray is the taint of vagueness and uncertainty.

Written with a lead pencil akin to those found in Nabokov, Rilke, Svevo, Poe, and Dickinson, The Gray Book chronicles the vicissitudes of such equivocal articulation - registering the graphite traces it leaves behind but also recording the dwindling span of its life.

The book situates itself in a region beyond criticism but this side of literature, characterized by forgetting and finitude, and investigating important yet seemingly inaccessible "gray areas" in texts as old as those of Homer and as recent as those of Beckett.

Loosely arranging these literary finds according to a revision of the four elements, The Gray Book distances itself from tradition and treats not water but tears, not fire but vapor, not earth but grain, not air but clouds. Themes and facts previously confined to the realm of quoted texts leak into the narrative itself.

The border between fiction and fact slowly dissolves as the book approaches the curious void that the author locates at the heart of "gray literature." Shaped by an omnipresent though increasingly unreliable narrator, The Gray Book may thus ultimately yield a poetics cast in the form of a ghost story.
Notes: "An earlier version ... was published in Swedish in 1994 by Norstedts Förlag AB, Stockholm, as Den grå boken"--T.p. verso.