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Repetition
Repetition is a poetic memoir of a daughter’s grief after her father’s death, as told to a loved one. These meditative prose poems journey through Paris, New York, and Berlin on bike rides “to watch the tower sparkle in the distance” and on walks “past the zoo in the dark, the animals calling.” Paul Celan and Gertrude Stein accompany the daughter through her grief until the speaker can finally say, “it’s enough—you can go now.”
- GenresPoetryNonfictionMemoir
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2015
About the author
Rebecca Reilly
1 book2 followersRebecca Reilly teaches creative writing at The New School, and is a doctoral candidate at The C.U.N.Y. Graduate Center. She taught for a number of years at The University of Paris X, Nanterre, and has taught at The New School, Parsons Paris, as well as Humboldt University in Berlin.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 1, 2017
This book is ridiculously good, and more people need to read it. It's a poetic-essay-meditation on grief (the author lost her father), and somehow ties into ideas of repetition, being an exile, family problems, memory, language, depression, death. At times philosophical, at times painful, honest, personal, and at times just beautiful without being overly poetic.
I'm not a huge descriptions guy, but the descriptions in here made me want to visit Paris.
I'm not a huge descriptions guy, but the descriptions in here made me want to visit Paris.
As the train exited the tunnel under the Alps into the bluest hour before dawn, when the shadow of the world is cast before itself by the sun coming up over the curvature of the earth--reflecting itself to itself--the mountains rose up behind the deep blue air as massed black shadows, and the moon shone on the glacial lakes around them. Along the base of the mountains, at the edge of the water, the lights of what must have been small towns glittered in the night, and it looked as though stars had slid from the sky, down the mountains, to drift along the edge of the mirrored lakes.and
In the distance, behind the tower, the hot-air balloon of Parc Andre Citroen rose and fell on its tether, evenly but slowly, at irregular intervals, as though a giant child were controlling it.The movement of the prose is slow and wandering, like someone who has only a vague memory of the path he must return to. And yet she always returns to her themes. The pace is that of a walking book, which is one of my obsessions, but here the author is on a bicycle. She cycles through Paris, remembers New York and Germany, recounts childhood, tries to understand the things she's going through by reading Paul Celan, Gertrude Stein, Lacan, and others. I wanted to include more quotes where she is being philosophical or personal, but they all seem to lack punch when taken out of context, so I'll just trust you to trust me and go read this for yourself.
June 26, 2017
A memoir with lots of white space as though the prose on the page were poetry, but the tone/clarity rarely activated prose-poem alarms in this reader. I turned the pages quickly and the structure's openness and resulting acceleration made me feel productive. Set in Paris, Brooklyn, and a bit of Berlin and New Jersey, the occasion for its composition is grief, the author's father's death (read most of it on Father's Day). It also covers depression, bicycling, the best pastries in Paris, and lost loves, long-distance relationships marked by longing correspondence. There's italicized French and, for me, way too many instances of reference to canonical white male writers and philosophers, the sort of thing that at this point irritates me since it so often seems to stand in for insight and too easily conjures a sense of literary significance/heft. Kant, Rilke, Celan, Archimedes, Lacan, et al . . . I suppose Wittgenstein and Bruno Schulz -- leaders of the contemporary reference brigade -- had prior engagements in other books. I liked when she sat with a friend in McGolrick Park in Greenpoint, a block from where I lived for a few years during the first GWB term. I liked, generally, the texture of scenes from major cities. Even the reference started to work for me toward the end. So easily it could've been overly pretentious, so easily thrown across the room, but instead I wanted to read it and keep turning pages until I'd reached the acknowledgments. Definitely a must for fans of spare referential writerly memoir of grief and depression in major cultural centers. I'm thankful for Jimmy's super-enthusiastic recommendation that alerted me to its existence and compelled the purchase.
July 15, 2015
One of the bravest and most gorgeous books I've read this year, maybe ever. Really deserves six stars, only that's not possible.
July 31, 2017
About twenty pages into this book I realized I had to slow the hell down because this was no ordinary novel. It is a story that demands the readers complete attention. This book covers mental illness, family dynamics, grief, meanderings in Paris and Berlin, NYC and Brooklyn. It's written like a long prose poem, pithy, insightful, often very sad. I had a notepad ready so I could jot down significant passages or references to authors whose work sounded compelling and worth reading.
May 14, 2016
This book was incredible as it took you through so many emotions and feelings, but I was astonished to find out that I am a French man. I'm starting to reread this almost immediately, for I'm sure there's more to learn.
Want to read
December 5, 2015this was maggie nelson's favorite book this year (from PW)
January 31, 2019
The timing of this book’s arrival in my life was magical. I picked it up a few months on a friend’s recommendation after spending 7 months living & working in rural France. My father had died about 18 months before. I believe that even if my situation hadn’t been so linked to the author’s, I would have still felt a magic in her playful approach to writing this book. The intertwining of prose and the mini excerpts of other writings, scene descriptions and almost diary like entries made for a very stream of conscious experience, but not in a masturbatory Jack Kerouac kind of way, more in that it brought you in but also allowed you to bring in your own related experiences. So many of us know deep grief. So many people who have lived outside of their birth country know the strange blend of cold isolation & freeing anonymity that comes with a fresh start in a new land.
June 26, 2017
Ahhhhh, Paris
Uhhhhh, Depression
Ohhhhh, Depression in Paris
Well I don't know, fall in the Seine
AAAAAUUUUUOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH
Uhhhhh, Depression
Ohhhhh, Depression in Paris
Well I don't know, fall in the Seine
AAAAAUUUUUOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH
April 22, 2017
Holy hell. What a book. Stunning and devastating and wise and vulnerable and lost and sad. Reilly miraculously corners the ineffable, intangible, uncontainable wreckage of grief and longing with her insight, her willingness, and her language--a language both poetic and profound. She manages to really say something here, something new, something nude. She bleeds on the page. Also one of the most brilliantly paced books I've ever read; the deluge that happens in the last fifty or sixty pages is unprecedented and unforeshadowed and therefore all the more moving.
In short: A masterpiece.
In short: A masterpiece.
December 1, 2015
This is a collection of prose poems that are beautifully and powerfully written by a woman who is struggling with grief and depression after the death of her father.
She is an amazing writer.
She is an amazing writer.
Shelved as 'to-buy'
December 15, 2015Maggie Nelson recommendation - she wrote one of publishers weekly 2015 best books
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews