BOOK OF WATER
Paperback
Extent: 72 pages
9781912475193 (PB)
9781912475643 (Ebook)
Price: $14 (PB)
A gloriously dripping clutch of miniatures, like glimpses through keyholes into unknowable place-times where people pursue curious tasks and succumb to occult intensities.
—Sally O’Reilly
Short, fantastic choreographies of bodies, land, and water that embrace the constant motion of aqueous encounters as the sea levels rise, membranes become permeable, and everyday life adjusts to a fluid world.
—Tim Creswell
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s Book of Water is a collection of short stories about desire, fear, life, care, and ecological anxiety, all narrated through the physical and metaphysical presence of water. This water is not the open, bucolic water of the romantic imagination. It is the claustrophobic water of the deep seabed, the flooded cities, the womb. It is a water that brings oblivion, serenity, and salvation.
At first glance, the stories appear to be narrated by a multiplicity of voices preoccupied with everyday psychological situations. At some point, however, the quotidian withdraws and gives way to surreal and disorienting encounters with ethical, political, psychoanalytical, ecological, and personal challenges. The book is a literary response to the current geological epoch of the Anthropocene, in which the effects of the human presence on the planet and its various elements seem by now irreversible. The bodies in this collection are not limited to the human—nonhuman and inhuman bodies alike occupy a central place in the stories. The protagonist, however, remains the body of water.
At first glance, the stories appear to be narrated by a multiplicity of voices preoccupied with everyday psychological situations. At some point, however, the quotidian withdraws and gives way to surreal and disorienting encounters with ethical, political, psychoanalytical, ecological, and personal challenges. The book is a literary response to the current geological epoch of the Anthropocene, in which the effects of the human presence on the planet and its various elements seem by now irreversible. The bodies in this collection are not limited to the human—nonhuman and inhuman bodies alike occupy a central place in the stories. The protagonist, however, remains the body of water.