Zona

When I was watching one of the extras on Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, an interview with Geoff Dyer it reminded me that he wrote a book about the film-Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (2012). It's an unusual book since it is something of a personal recollection of one person's relationship with a film that he has revisited many times over the years.It is essentially a summary of the film according to Dyer, but it is filled with segue to other references, authors, and events in his Dyer's life. Some of these diversions include Kenzaburo Oe's The Quiet Life, the films of Robert Bresson, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, the novels of Don DeLillo, poetry from Wordsworth, W. H. Auden, Billy Collins, and Philip Larkin, Milan Kundera's Immortality, William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, the philosophy of Heidegger, among other artistic and cultural touchstones. It is a rambling and entertaining discussion of one man's cinematic giving tree that continue to inspire thought and interpretation through multiple viewings-one man's obsession with a single cinematic masterpiece.