Drifts

A Novel

By: Kate Zambreno

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Length: 7 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's summary

“Drifts is a dazzling and enjoyable book. Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup. I've never read truer pages on the subject of pregnancy. No writer has come so close to achieving a total grasp of life: the entanglement of everyday things, a writing project, and a pregnant body, in a single work.”—Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Paris Review, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Esquire, Vulture, and Refinery29

“Reading all Zambreno feels like the jolt one gets from a surprise cut or burn in the kitchen, that sudden recognition that you’re in a body and the body can be hurt.”—Alicia Kennedy, Refinery29

Haunting and compulsively enjoyable, Drifts is an intimate portrait of reading, writing, and creative obsession. At work on a novel that is overdue, spending long days walking neighborhood streets with her restless terrier, corresponding ardently with fellow writers, the narrator grows obsessed with the challenge of writing the present tense, of capturing time itself. Entranced by the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, Albrecht Dürer, Chantal Akerman, and others, she photographs the residents and strays of her neighborhood, haunts bookstores and galleries, and records her thoughts in a yellow notebook that soon subsumes her work on the novel. As winter closes in, a series of disturbances—the appearances and disappearances of enigmatic figures, the burglary of her apartment—leaves her distracted and uncertain . . . until an intense and tender disruption changes everything.

A story of artistic ambition, personal crisis, and the possibilities and failures of literature, Drifts is the work of an exhilarating and vital writer.

©2020 Kate Zambreno (P)2020 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“[Drifts] captures the fitful stops, starts, shame, joy, and boredom that go into creating a work of art.”—The Paris Review

“Full of wit and candor.”—Catherine Lacey, The New York Times Book Review

“Mesmerizing . . . Zambreno’s persona on the page is a tracker of moods and feelings that resist being stuffed and mounted with words.”—The New Yorker

It's the little things that count.

In her autofiction novel 'Drifts', Kate Zambreno writes in a very casual, contemplative style, about the frustration and isolation involved in the process of giving birth to a work of art. She candidly blends in her story the banal and the deeply personal, all of which forms part of her everyday experience. When a well-established author and colleague asks her what sort of work she writes, she can think of nothing better than to answer, "Prose, little things..." She comments on the lives of other artists, like the celebrated feminist filmmaker Chantal Akerman, whose masterpiece shows a woman performing the most mundane acts, or of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and his monastic habits, on how he once asked the sculptor Auguste Rodin about "how to find the quiet space inside himself within from which to work". She repeatedly returns to certain works of art, like Albrecht Dürer's 'Melencolia I', an engraving of a gloomy female angel, who is perhaps waiting for inspiration. Indeed, melancholia figures prominently in this narrative. She struggles with the approaching deadline for her book, which she keeps postponing. At times, she seems trapped in her circumstances, like a character dreamed up by Kafka, whom she also writes about. But she keeps treading forward, like the professional writer that she is. She sometimes seems affected by all the duties that she's expected to perform. "Lately, I've been fixing my students' writing problems in my sleep." As she gestates her work of literature, she also becomes pregnant with a baby. Her body changes and so does her relationship with the world around her. It takes courage both to be an artist and to bring a person into this world. She counts with the company of her husband (and of her trusty sidekick, her dog Jeunet), but one can see that it can get tough. Rather than become paralyzed with the challenges that she faces, both emotional and practical, she takes that raw material and makes art with it, which feels alive and relevant.

Narrator Cassandra Campbell's reading has an appropriate ring of cosmopolitan sophistication and intimacy.