These Threads Who Lead to Bramble - by Russell Persson (Paperback)

About the Book

"This is a book that contains multitudes -- a celebration of the forgotten marginalia of Westernized thought. Persson's collection delves into eccentric twentieth-century American photographers, the lives of his ancestors both distant and recent, and of the artist Egon Schiele in prison, teetering on the edge of sanity. He interweaves the careers of three obscure composers -- Alban Berg, Erik Satie, and Anton Webern -- and imagines the composer's life based on the textures of his compositions. Using the fugitive recollections of road trips, incomplete and unreliable family histories, photographs and considerations of deep time, Persson is a mapmaker charting the salvage of lost days. As the work builds, the borders between personal memory and collective history become ever more abstract, blending inner and outer spheres to confront the unknowable expanse of universal existence. A must-read for fans of Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, and W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz. This work includes black-and-white reproductions of Egon Schiele's drawings, with permission from The ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna" --Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

"Dazzling... a book to read again and again."-Tom Jeffreys, editor of Walking: Documents of Contemporary Art and author of The White Birch

Russell Persson's These Threads Who Lead to Bramble defies the singularity of any one genre as it braids together memory and myth to challenge the limits of our collective imagination

This is a book that contains multitudes--a celebration of the forgotten marginalia of Westernized thought. Persson's collection delves into eccentric twentieth-century American photographers, the lives of his ancestors both distant and recent, and of the artist Egon Schiele in prison, teetering on the edge of sanity. He interweaves the careers of three obscure composers--Alban Berg, Erik Satie, and Anton Webern--and imagines the composer's life based on listening to their music, rather than the other way around. And he charts the path of his own life from a long-ago teenage road trip, sleeping in the backs of friends' cars and trying to find himself inside a vast world.

As the work builds, the lines between personal memory and collective history become ever more abstract, blending inner and outer spheres to confront the unknowable expanse of universal existence. A must-read for fans of Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, and W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz.

This work includes black-and-white reproductions of Egon Schiele's drawings, with permission from The ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna.

Review Quotes

"In this sublime essay collection, novelist Persson (The Way of Florida) interrogates the unreliability and inventiveness of historical memory ... This astonishes."

-Publishers Weekly, starred review

"The serpentine sentences of this dazzling collection echo the connections that emerge between its subjects: memory and forgetting, love and loss, embodied genealogies of legacy and inheritance (the never simple passing down from fathers to sons of, say, admiration or resentment, the angle of a hairline or the precise timbre in which certain words might be spoken). Persson tells stories for which no other cartography can exist, recalls or imagines narratives that won't be verified, explores the myriad ways in which painting, drawing, photography and music might intervene in flows of meaning or in the construction of time. With memory a kind of erasure, and forgetfulness an ever-creative force, Persson gives us a twisting grammar of joyful tumblings. This is a book to read again and again."
-Tom Jeffreys, editor of Walking: Documents of Contemporary Art and author of The White Birch

"By turns tender, erudite, and uncanny, the frequently biographical pieces collected here cover a lot of ground, from European composers to the history of the earth through road trips and onomastics. Haunted by undying dead fathers and ever drowning Ophelias, they are beautifully haunting. Russell Persson is a true original--a latter-day alchemist, transmuting prosaic prose into unalloyed poetry. No one else writes like this; his style is sui generis."-Andrew Gallix, author of Unwords