Passages Book

A Mediterranean travelelogue of disaffection and dissolution, Passages follows a women searching for her brother, dead or alive, across unnamed and war-torn countries, while her sometime lover alternately aids her search and follows his own into erotic excess. This is a very oblique story, conveyed in fragments and journal-bound notes, where themes and details flutter by and lost into a desolate landscape more than they compose a linear narrative. It may be Ann Quin's best writing, though, suprising me with its poetic clarity after the messiness of her first novel, and heavily-collaged last (there, though, the messiness seems entirely deliberate and thematically apt, however, as the unstoppable rush of modern media constantly interrupts and disrupts the prose). In any event, this catches Quin at her at her most exacting, perhaps recomposing the muddled search of her sometime collaborator Alan Burns' sludgily disconcerting Europe After the Rain, in a series of hallucinatory postcards. Like that one, this is a book that must simply be surrendered to and carried away by.