Writing the Virus: New Work from StatORec magazine

by Andrea Scrima, David Winner (Editor)

The East Village of the early eighties;
a divided Berlin; Brooklyn approaching
the end of the millennium. Alternating
between the various addresses of a restless
life on two continents, A Lesser Day is
a memoir in which part of the story takes
place between the lines, untold.

In the freezing studios and working-class
flats of Kreuzberg, we meet Sabine from
across the bleak courtyard, a sturdy mother
of four who disappears one day and whose
adolescent daughters gradually grow wild;
Martin, the charismatic boy with an alcoholic
stepfather and his own hidden streak of cruelty;
Ivo, a Croatian car mechanic who returns home
to fight in the war as the landlady’s nine-year-
old son sets about throwing rocks at the
windowpanes of his workshop.

When the narrator travels to New York to
attend her father’s funeral shortly after Nov-
ember 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall fell,
a period begins in which her hold on reality
grows increasingly tenuous. Hiding away in
her studio with her father’s journals, her pain-
tings building up inch by inch in a fruitless
attempt to come to terms with human mortality,
she sets about deciphering her father’s encoded
script. Addressing a continually shifting “you”
in a search for emotional understanding initially
directed at the author’s dead father and then
merging into a blur of intimate others, A Lesser
Day explores the mechanisms of memory and
suppression in an era of political upheaval.
Little escapes the author’s scrutinizing eye
as she locates meaning in the passage of time
as it inscribes itself into the myriad things
around us: the mute, insentient witnesses of
our everyday existence.

Kindle Edition

First published June 15, 2010

About the author

Andrea Scrima studied fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, Germany, where she lives and works. A German translation of her first book, “A Lesser Day” (2nd edition 2018, Spuyten Duyvil) was published in 2018 by Literaturverlag Droschl, Graz, under the title “Wie viele Tage.” In 2021, “Kreisläufe” followed, the German edition of an as yet unpublished second novel.
Scrima’s criticism can be read in literary journals including The Brooklyn Rail, Music & Literature, The Times Literary Supplement, LitHub, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The Scofield, The Millions, the Austrian literary magazines Schreibkraft and Manuskripte, and the German magazine Schreibheft. She is editor-in-chief of the literary magazine StatORec and writes a column for Three Quarks Daily.

Scrima was the recipient of a literature fellowship from the Berlin Senate for Science, Research, and the Arts in Berlin, Germany, as well as two research grants from the Senate for Culture and Europe; in 2007 she won a National Hackney Literary Award and in 2010 the Glimmer Train Fiction Open. In the spring of 2011 she took part in a writing fellowship at the Ledig House / Art Omi residency program in Ghent, New York.

Scrima has received numerous awards for her artistic work, including a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1989/1990) and the Lingen Art Prize (Kunstverein Lingen, Germany; 1996). Scrima has been represented in exhibitions i.a. at the Franklin Furnace, New York; the Contemporary Art Center, Moscow; Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen; American Academy in Rome; Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg; Kunst Haus Dresden; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein; The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, and many other institutions and commercial galleries internationally. Her artist’s book Panta Rhei is part of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Whitney Museum, and the Houghton Library at Harvard, among others.

You can follow her blog at:
https://andreascrima.wordpress.com

Read an extensive interview with the author in Music & Literature:
http://www.musicandliterature.org/fea...
and in the The Brooklyn Rail:
https://brooklynrail.org/2015/05/book...

Reviews

[Heloise Jacobs]

This is not a book to be read before you want to fall asleep. You need to pay attention. You need to read between the lines.
So often in my life books have crossed my path at just the right time and the timing of a read is what make some books memorable. A Lesser Day is such a book for me. Having also lost my father recently and still dealing with the grieving process; I'm also living on two continents and dealing with scattered possessions; I've also been through the parental-home getting smaller and smaller and losing that home forever. These are some topics Scrima touches in a heart-felt way.
What I love most is the detail and the small things that do not escape her artists' mind and eye. Beautifully written. I will read it again, soon.

My favourite quote:
“How to go back in time: one would have to subtract everything that has come after, shed the skins that have accumulated since: peel them off one by one and forget them. To undo all that has occurred, to have found oneself in none of these situations, to lose entire parts of oneself: to forget. To disappear, to undo oneself. And when my mind carries me back, it is as another.How to go back in time: one would have to subtract everything that has come after, shed the skins that have accumulated since: peel them off one by one and forget them. To undo all that has occurred, to have found oneself in none of these situations, to lose entire parts of oneself: to forget. To disappear, to undo oneself. And when my mind carries me back, it is as another.”

[Kyra]

That. Was. Boring.

[Aimee Parkison]

A wonderful debut novel exploring time, memory, and place in the life of the artist narrator. Lovely, crisp language. Precise specific details. A real sense of interiority, texture, and space.

[Evie]

I really enjoyed reading this collection of essays as we near thr one year anniversary of the Covid pandemic. Of course, as with all collections, I resonated with some more than others. This is not a scientific analysis or a historical recording of events, but a more experiential telling of events from the perspective of the various authors all over the world, but mostly in the US and Germany. The essays are not confined to only Covid, but also take on the other events of the year - the presidential election, the protests in response to police violence against African-Americans. The writers tend toward a more liberal/left perspective.

Side note: the ebook version is not easy to navigate; the essays are not divided in a way that you can jump around easily.