Zona: On Andrei Tarkovsky’s 'Stalker' - Tapa blanda

One of my favourite of all contemporary writers. -- Alain de Botton Reading Dyer is akin to the sudden elation and optimism you feel when you make a new friend, someone as silly as you but cleverer too, in whose company you know you will travel through life more vagrantly, intensely, joyfully. * * Daily Telegraph * * There is no contemporary writer I admire more than Dyer, and in no book of his does he address his animating idea - The Only Way Not to Waste Time Is to Waste It - more overtly, urgently, emphatically and eloquently. -- David Shields, author of REALITY HUNGER Few books about film feel like watching a film, but this one does. We sit with Dyer as he writes about Stalker; he captures its mystery and burnish, he prises it open and gets its glum majesty. As a result of this book, I know the film better, and care about Tarkovsky even more. -- Mark Cousins, author of THE STORY OF FILM I loved this book. How can it possibly work - a book describing a film, more or less shot by shot? But it triumphantly does - i actually felt suspense, and revelation. And i'd never laugh at Stalker, but i did laugh all the way through this. -- Tessa Hadley, author of THE LONDON TRAIN A restless polymath and an irresistibly funny storyteller, he is adept at fiction, essay and reportage, but happiest when twisting all three into something entirely his own. * * New Yorker * * A true original . . . [Dyer] never ceases to surprise, disturb and delight. -- William Boyd A national treasure. -- Zadie Smith Perennially readable and wonderfully difficult to second-guess * * Bookseller * * Zona is penned with great linguistic flair, in a non-academic, conversational tone... It turns Zona from film criticism into a stranger, more amusing study and the section on why their journey is like the journey of writing a book is both intellectually neat and rather touching. * * Independent on Sunday * * Dyer is the perfect man for the job of unpicking the complex mysteries of Tarkovsky's Zone. He has a rare talent for writing about high-minded concerns with disarming simplicity. * * Observer * * A must-read for those who love the offbeat. * * Prospect * * Zona is written from a position of undiminished wonder, renewing our faith in the possibilities of cinema and reminding us of the importance of living attentive lives. Saying that Dyer tests our patience is a compliment of the highest order. * * We Love This Book * * Like the wind that batters Tarkovsky's desolate landscape, Dyer's argument bloweth where is liseth and takes us into unexpected personal areas...[Zona] duplicates the floating, restless way we watch those films that we love deeply. * * Literary Review * * Dyer, ever the postmodernist, thrives on the futility of his critical mission...and he duly unleashes a battle between footnotes and central text, relentlessly peppering his Tarkovskian plot precis with beautiful biographical notes. * * The Times * * [Geoff Dyer] can be laugh out loud funny...[Zona] is a work which generates meanings rather than exhausts them by specificity. The loveliness of Dyer's book is that he could write it again in a decade and it would be different again. * * Scotland on Sunday * * No writer can flex and stretch in digressive prose more congenially than Dyer...Zona, like Stalker, is a narrative without focus. It shilly-shallies aimlessly but also pricelessly. Therapy for Dyer, bliss for the reader. * * The Sunday Telegraph * * This is classic Dyer territory - an extended, near-formless work of art. * * Word Magazine * * This is a rigorous book, and one that celebrates properly a lifelong devotion to an artistic masterpiece. But it is also entertaining. As such, it is almost revolutionary in form. * * Financial Times * * Zona is the rare book that respects the mystery of a film without feeling obliged to dismantle it * * Evening Standard * * [Geoff Dyer] shows how writing about film can deliver a sense of adventure. His book offers the satisfaction of a meditation that inhales a much larger world -- Nick James * * Sight and Sound * * Throughout, the writing is of an aphoristic grace and concision, suffused with humour and a delight to read -- Ian Thomson * * The Independent * * It's Dyer's ability at moments like this to make pilgrims of his readers and to lead them on a journey in search of truths about love and about the nature of happiness that make Zona such an exhilarating achievement -- Sukhdev Sanhu * * The Guardian * * Doesn't so much inject fun into the film's eerie Soviet glamour as find comedy in the gulf between us and our objects of desire -- Boyd Tonkin * * Independent * * An investigation into everything from faith to knapsacks. Therapy for Dyer, bliss for the reader * * The Daily Telegraph * * Dyer lifts Tarkovsky up to the level of a Homer in the sense that Stalker encompasses history, myth and a fantastical journey that only art can communicate * * Noovella * *

In this spellbinding book, the man described by the Daily Telegraph as 'possibly the best living writer in Britain' takes on his biggest challenge yet: unlocking the film that has obsessed him all his adult life. Like the film Stalker itself, it confronts the most mysterious and enduring questions of life and how to live.