Avoid the Day: A New Nonfiction in Two Movements – A Narrative Memoir of Béla Bartók's Mystery and Existential Horror

by Jay Kirk

"Avoid the Day truly seems to me to push nonfiction memoir as far as it can go without it collapsing into a singularity and I am at a loss for words. You are just going to have to read it." –Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk

A surreal, high-wire act of narrative nonfiction that redefines the genre, Avoid the Day is part detective story, part memoir, and part meditation on the meaning of life—all told with a dark pulse of existential horror. What emerges is an unforgettable study of mortality and the artist’s journey.

Seeking to answer the mystery of a missing manuscript by Béla Bartók, and using the investigation to avoid his father’s deathbed, award-winning magazine writer Jay Kirk heads off to Transylvania, going to the same villages where the “Master,” like a vampire in search of fresh plasma, had found his new material in the folk music of the peasants. With these stolen songs, Bartók redefined music in the 20th Century. Kirk, who is also seeking to renew his writing, finds inspiration in the composer’s unorthodox methods, but begins to lose his tether as he sees himself in Bartók’s darkest and most personal work, the Cantata Profana, which revolves around the curse of fathers and sons.

After a near-psychotic episode under the spell of Bartók, the author suddenly finds himself on a posh eco-tourist cruise in the Arctic. There, accompanied by an old friend, now a documentary filmmaker, the two decide to scrap the documentary and make a horror flick instead—shot under the noses of the unsuspecting passengers and crew. Playing one of the main characters who finds himself inexplicably trapped on a ship at the literal end of the world, alone, and under the influence of the midnight sun, Kirk gets lost in his own cerebral maze, struggling to answer his most plaguing can we find meaning in experience?

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Essays, Music

382 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 28, 2020

Reviews

[Jenna Gareis · Rating 2 out of 5]

A desperate attempt to create something out of next to nothing. While I enjoyed the first sixty pages or so...the drive to find something sinister in every ordinary thing became much too distracting for me. I did finish it. I’ll give it that. Two stars for being entertaining but I really take little else away from this completely self-indulgent romp.

[Jim Mcvoy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Monday, August 24, 2020. I finished reading Avoid the Day by Jay Kirk last night. It was a mixed bag. The first half was about a “lost” manuscript of Bartok’s String Quartet no. 3 that had a bit of mystery and intrigue that involved some folks at Penn that I used to know at least in passing. Kirk’s character delineation and sense of place made it a good read. His adventures in Hungary and Romania were particularly entertaining although his understanding of things musical was, to be kind, shaky at best. The second part of the book centered around a Lindblad cruise to Svalbard during which he and a friend were filming a travel documentary and improvising a horror film on the side. The author’s emotional baggage got frankly tedious along the way and I found the ending unsatisfying.

[Holly Leigher · Rating 3 out of 5]

A surreal, vivid, slow-motion crash landing. This memoir is wrapped not-so-snugly inside its little spaceship as it slowly, painfully hurtles to Earth. Or some other planet where life is somehow worse.

[Cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much like Bartók's seamless (yet as result of particular labour) synthesis of western orchestral style and by-rote eastern european folk music tradition, and with some element of the same shy yet itinerate eccentricity, Kirk blends one part journalistic endeavour and other memoir into one twisting nonfiction narrative.

The postmodern oozes from the page, explicit reference to Frankenstein, clever nods to music history and literature, philosophy, and all. It's constructed as a chimera, each body part reflective of its contents: research log, travel journal, personal diary. I'm not sure reviewing really gives it justice in this respect; it's a bending, dynamic and highly personal book grappling with the closeness of mental state and artistic output in the midst of a given social climate.

ARC acquired from Harper Perennial, through my place of work, Oxford Exchange in Tampa FL.

[S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Avoid The Day is the first book I've read since DFW's Infinite Jest that sets off all the brain bells and reality-charred coal whistles. Lose all sense of time and space in this intra-tropal labyrinth!

Béla Bartók was obsessed with hunting down rare gypsy music in the hills of Eastern Europe...
In one scene of this existential detective story, retracing Bartók's hunt leaves the narrator's perception merging with an uncertain past in a remote outhouse, to the distant off-key screaming of a tone-deaf woman's one-stringed violin.

A painting inspired by this unforgettable passage in the text:



And before we even get to the second movement of this utterly bizarre, genre-bending work of narrative non-fiction...

Time and selves collapse through each other, arriving as compound experiences in a way that is instantly recognizable as a signature quality of classic Jay Kirk phenomenology. I believe Whitman and his Sleepers would have bitterly envied this facet of symbolic incorporation. It's a quality of Kirk's writing that I very much adore. And now you can adore it too!

Get the book here.
Download free/printable bookmarks to go with the text here.

[Whitney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fans of Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, assemble! Are you a fan of Donnie Darko? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Step on up cause we’re going on a ride.

Avoid the Day is a nonfiction tale told in two parts. Our author, and main character, Jay, takes us through his internal turmoil around his fathers impending death and lack of human connection.

These crises are the backdrop across two drastically different scenes. Part one, Jay travels across Transylvania retracing the steps of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók known for collecting lost folk songs and incorporating them into sweeping symphonies.

Part two, Jay departs (seemingly mid adventure) to go to the Arctic with a friend to shoot an undercover horror flick about the end of the world. In both locations Jay waxes poetic on his drug habit, creative limitations and previous abuse. All while throwing out some of the most niche vocabulary I’ve ever seen published.

I can only describe this as heady. Not quite memoir, not quite research paper, this book slides between genres and will have you returning to various moral questions over and over.

[Sunni | vanreads]

Avoid the Day by Jay Kirk is part memoir and part story of the author's search to find a Transylvanian composer's (Béla Bartók) missing manuscript. It promises a genre-bending journey that delves into the meaning of life.

I normally really enjoy weird books that don't seem to fit into any genre. I absolutely love books that focus on the philosophical aspects of life. However, this book just didn't do it for me. It may be a spell binding adventure for some readers, but I just felt like the main character needed serious help. He's drugged half the time and he certainly loses himself in his craft, but not in a good way. It gives me serious flashbacks to my undergraduate degree where we studied over-glorified white artists, whose idea of art is to push boundaries in areas that make no sense to me.

Thank you to Harper Perennial for sending me this ARC for review.

[Kenneth Masloski · Rating 1 out of 5]

I honestly could not care any less about this person's bullshit. Deceptively a memoir pretending to be about something else that would've been more interesting. I do not need another self-important white guy telling me stories about his life HE THINKS are profound but are in fact like when someone tells you a dream they had: who gives a shit?

Got to the beginning of the second "movement" (ugh) - and the premise was too bad for me to finish. Wasted my time.

[Pasuuna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ever since an early excerpt appeared as "Bartok's Monsters" in Harper's way back in 2013, I have been awaiting the publication of this book. As a classical musician interested in treatments of "folk art" I was expectant that Jay's book would flesh out the search for Bartok's "missing" musical score and tie it in with Bartok's attempts to capture the spontaneity, structure, _and_ randomness of folk music.

Instead, after a strong first "movement" the book shifts tone and focus entirely, becoming an indulgent romp on an Arctic cruise dripping with privilege. The Bartok "theme" is utterly abandoned in favor of discussions of drugs, ruminations of suicide, and a literal sci-fi movie script.

I realize that no work is going to meet a reader's expectations fully but this one was more disappointing than most. I absolutely sympathize with Jay's bouts of depression and self-loathing, tempered by prescription medication and alcohol. However, I am uninterested in reading about the juvenile games he and his compatriots choose to engage in rather than perform their jobs in the High Arctic.

And, Jay, no one is going to shame you for your desires here...but not a single reader needs to know about the legs and garment choices of various - much younger - women that you sneaked glances at. Just because you are an ardent adherent to the male gaze doesn't mean your readers need to be.

[Kristen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the first half of Avoid the Day by Jay Kirk. This section revolves around a missing manuscript by the composer, Bela Bartok, with autobiographical bits about the author's life and family thrown in. I was intrigued enough by the descriptions of Bartok that I am interested in learning more about the man and his work outside of this book. I felt like Kirk threw in the towel too early on his quest to learn more about Bartok, his manuscript, and the people who worked to save or hide it. I so wanted him to keep digging further into the mystery, even if we ended up with no solid answers, just for the experience.

Unfortunately, the second half of the book felt like a slowly escalating downhill slide. It took me too many pages into the second section to realize that all talk of Bartok was gone and that the entire focus was now on Kirk and a cruise he took to avoid his father's death bed. On this cruise Kirk and a friend decide to use the resources at hand to make an indie horror movie. SO MANY PAGES were dedicated to incredibly bland conversations between Kirk and his friend about what the monster in the horror movie should be. By the time I reached pages that piqued my interest (waxing philosophical about life and death, getting weird with the hollow earth theory, etc.) I was so exhausted from the banal dialogue that I skimmed the last 30 pages or so.

Perhaps a different editor was needed to help shine this book that held so much promise into a treasure.

[Dan Rothenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I totally love this book! Kirk interweaves worlds that most writers wouldn’t attempt to combine, and the intricacy and precision of the weave is astounding. He’s a maestro of dizzying capacity, and he knows how to march you headlong into the existential void of your own buried dread. But the writing is so maddeningly good, the journey is somehow still so enjoyable. Amazing! Read it.

[jennifer]

Gonzo journalism about Bartok? A drug-addled Vice Magazine proposal? The Bell Jar and Prozac Nation for dudes who dropped out of their PhD programs? A profound book-length cry for help?

Into the mythology tangent. And the Philly connections.

[Marshal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uniquely different blend of a glimpse into the authors psyche and the life of a brilliant yet odd composer's life. Definitely a slow burn style read but once it got going I very much enjoyed Kirk's personal story, keen comparisons, and Poe and Shelley conections.

[Jen Parenti · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whew! I didn’t know what was going on half of the time. But the writing has some absolutely beautiful passages. I think this must’ve been a very cathartic book to write. Very interesting events, lots of alcohol and pills and long wandering passages.

[Edyn-Mae Stevenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Admittedly a bit sexist, self-indulgent, narcissistic, and pretentious, with no real ending. But there’s something hypnotic about Kirk’s macabre inner-world that makes it worth the read.

[Oliver Sime · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good writing, but not a whole lot going on

[Rob · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

[Cynthia Sprout · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good!

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful and amazing...see tags for description

[Googoogjoob · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF at page 250. This is real bad. It should not have been published.

This book is framed as an experimental memoir. In reality, it's plainly two subpar long-form pieces the author couldn't get to work on their own. Neither ever gets its wings and takes flight, and neither is quite book-length. He tried to rectify these problems by just kinda smushing them together. The transition between the halves is abrupt and jarring, and there's only been very perfunctory work done to stitch the two halves together.

The first half of the book (actually a bit more than half- 215 out of 370 pages) concerns the mystery of the provenance of a Bela Bartok autograph. The problem is, ultimately, that there isn't actually any mystery, as Kirk uncovers in his investigation. There's hearsay about a tussle over custody of the manuscript, about competing personalities in the world of Pennsylvanian classical music, maybe a pseudo-bank heist, whatever, but it turns out there's nothing to any of it, really. Kirk doesn't tell the reader this up front, of course. Instead he bounces between threads- trying to track down the manuscript's provenance in Philadelphia; bits of anecdotal stories about Bartok himself; and a trip Kirk made to Transylvania to look into the folk sources of Bartok's music. He regularly goes on long indulgent non sequitur digressions about his childhood, about his drug abuse, and especially about his father, who is dying, and whose deathbed he's trying to avoid. None of these threads end up paying off- Kirk just kind of manically juggles them around, using colorful, labored language to cover for their shallowness, before he's forced to allow them to peter out into nothing. He clearly doesn't know very much, or care very much, about Bartok's music in itself, either- his interest in the manuscript is entirely in the hopes that it'll make for a good, arcane, exciting story he can sell to a magazine. It's embarrassing. Parts of this first section were printed in Harper's in 2013. As presented here, it's drastically expanded, and also much worse.

Even more embarrassing is the second part of the book, the part that made me give up in despair. Abruptly, Kirk is on a weeklong Arctic cruise out of Norway, with a friend who is a travel filmmaker, and said friend's cameraman. They plan to make an incoherent, plotless horror film on the cruise ship on the side, in the down time between shooting travel documentary footage. This is dumb and boring, and also clearly not enough to write a whole book about. The thrust of this section, I guess, is that Kirk continues to melt down and freak out and be a dope on the boat for 150 pages. This is where I gave up.

Kirk tries almost to make a virtue of his manic circling around nothing- he talks about the supposed void at the center of the Bartok piece, he recurringly brings up how he's avoiding his father's deathbed, the book is titled "Avoid the Day." But it doesn't work. There's nothing here. All Kirk succeeds at is making himself look like an ass- ignoring his dying father, drinking and popping pills to avoid thinking about his responsibilities, constantly voyeuristically mentioning women's calves, failing utterly to make any of this interesting. Parts of this book like what would happen if you took a random English major and held a gun to their head and told them to write! Write anything! It doesn't matter if it's good, just write! He often comes across as patronizingly elitist as well, whether it's towards poorer Philadelphians or rural Romanians.

Miserable.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mixed bag and a strange but provocative work of non-fiction. It starts with the author searching for a hidden manuscript of the composer Bela Bartok, which, through a set of circumstances enhanced by the author's struggles with addiction, to his involvement making a horror movie in the Arctic. Ruminations and meditations abound and the writing is sharp and sometimes jarring. It's definitely not a book for everyone, but there are pleasures to be found in this writer's struggle with art, family, and alcohol.

[Dominic Hilton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wheeling, delirious travelogue

Jumping around space and time, this highly entertaining memoir is laced with sharp, honest humor and batshit tangents. Original and poignant, this story takes you to places you didn’t expect to visit.