TOAF (To After That) by Renee Gladman

To After That by Renee Gladman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Published by the Dorothy Project in 2008, this unconventional work is a retracing of the author's journaling, reading, walking and thinking about a novel she was writing in March of 2000.

She is a poet who lives and walks through an unnamed town with her dog Eva and writes in cafes. She occasionally mentions her lover, Frog. She provides a scene or two from the subject novel or novella, After That.

"Inevitably, one kind of reading leads to another kind, and it was this moving from author to author that allowed me to cover ground as to the nature of my tone," she explains and mentions the "undefined flatness of Julio Cortázar's prose" and the simplistic character in The Gangsters by the late French writer Hervé Guibert who wrote To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life about having HIV. Other references:

Marguerite Duras's Two by Duras: The Slut of the Normandy Coast / The Atlantic Man

Peter Greenaway film The Falls
Anna Bailey's "obscure festival" film, Carla and Aïda, about two black lovers not unlike the author and her Frog, and the narrator explores that film in great detail. I could not find the film online.

Michelangelo Antonioni's film of Red Desert..

I enjoyed meandering along with this author, but many puzzles remain and I look forward to further exploration of her readings and other writing.

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