Winner of the 2022 Vermont Book Award for Creative Nonfiction
“[Aurelia, Aurélia is] like one of those remote places populated by landrace flora and fauna that exist nowhere else on earth. . . . [Kathryn Davis] has written a memoir that mimics the atemporal quality of the episodes that give meaning to life. Aurelia, Aurélia doesn’t care for the constraints of melody, but is nonetheless an entrancing song.”—Molly Young, The New York Times
“A glimmering memoir like none you’ve ever read. . . . Davis’ novels have often featured wanderers and seekers, allegories of self-exile and scenes evicted from the tangible world. This tendency to sidestep reality has allowed her to successfully transcend the conventional let-me-tell-you style of memoir in favor of something rarer, more ethereal.”—Leslie Pariseau, Los Angeles Times
“A work of great originality. . . . Every inimitable story must leave in the mind of the reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, even unsettling pleasure, or haunting pleasure; such a story has to have joy and sadness that at times may seem the same thing; it has to have, to paraphrase an idyll of Theocritus, shades of light and darkness moving over a field. Davis’ memoir has all of the above. The virtuoso writing in Aurelia, Aurélia is a reprieve from all ghastly things.”—Howard Norman, Lit Hub
“The beauty of Aurelia, Aurélia, the beauty of all good literature, is how it allows us to be present in the past. Davis's childhood is with her still, and it's with her readers, and enchanting in a more immediate sense than the loss pressing in on her from all sides.”—James Butler-Gruett, DIAGRAM
“[An] exquisite, lightning-bolt bright, zigzagging, and striking musing on the self, life, death.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist
“In a work such as Davis’, the secret sauce is tasted during the leap between sentences and paragraphs, not in the accretion of life facts and their self-assertions. . . . For some of us, life is a cabaret or a box of chocolates or a marathon-not-a-sprint, but for Davis it’s a bardo. . . . I felt the shivers while reading Aurelia, Aurelia – and enjoyed that sensation so much that I read it again for the pleasures of its transitional moments and snappy prose.”—Ron Slate, On the Seawall
“In Aurelia, Aurélia . . . it’s the consideration of grief’s reverberations—that is, not what grief is, but what grief makes one think about—that serves to sharpen the sense of loss. The straying is the point. . . . For someone concerned with destabilization in time and space, a hallmark of Davis’ style is the directness and simplicity of her prose. . . . [ Aurelia, Aurélia] does something to you with language—in language—that is recognizable and palpable yet, like grief, resists easy order.” —Thomas Mira y Lopez, Cleveland Review of Books
“There are passages in Davis' lavishly imaginative novels that read like first-person autobiography. And there are parts of her new Aurelia, Aurélia . . . that are ingenious fabrications. . . . Davis is a maestro of atmosphere and mood. . . . [Aurelia, Aurélia] exemplifies her entanglement of the expository and the fanciful, the plain and the fantastic. . . . This isn't grief as primal scream but elegy with an uncannily light touch. The effect might even be called comic in the Shakespearean way of enfolding sorrow within enchantment. Memory opens and reopens and keeps leading back to the fact of a beloved's death; the outcome, however, isn't just loss but transformation.”—Jim Schley, Seven Days
“Bending genre and time, [Aurelia, Aurélia] is a pleasure to get lost in.”—Publishers Weekly
“Brief yet stunning. . . . An attentive reader and erudite writer, Davis plumbs her internal archive in search of solace and clarity in the face of ineffable tragedy. . . . These disparate moments transform the memoir into something that flows more like a guided dream, rendered in daring, vulnerable prose, steeped in death but brilliantly transformative. . . . A transcendent work of literary divination.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“As a fan of her novels, I knew what to expect from Kathryn Davis: the beautiful prose, the depth of thought, the originality, the wit. But I was not prepared to be as moved as I was reading her intensely poignant memoir. She has a gift for writing about the most difficult subjects with honesty, precision, and grace, and though much of it is heartbreaking Aurelia, Aurélia made me rejoice.”—Sigrid Nunez
“This is simply an incomparable book. Kathryn Davis has created what feels like a parallel plane of existence where lucky strangers—readers—are allowed to briefly visit.”—Heidi Julavits
“Kathryn Davis’s Aurelia, Aurélia is a splendid memoir, a spiritually fortifying meditation on the concept of transition as it applies to literature, music, life and death. The discovery of life’s ending comes early with fairy tales and later with her beloved husband’s death. In between she discovers words and writers and music. Reading To the Lighthouse with its famous transition, Davis is transported: ‘You leave the page behind and if you’re lucky you’re granted access to the mind of the person who wrote what was on it.’ Kathryn Davis grants her readers such access, and it is exhilarating. This is visionary work that rewards reading and re-reading.”—Christine Schutt
“Kathryn Davis's novels are like no one else's. It should not have surprised me (and yet it did) that her memoir is just as singular. In the same way that a Möbius strip plays tricks with surfaces, Aurelia, Aurélia plays tricks with time. The voice it adopts is classically retrospective, yet it lays its material out with an unusual simultaneity of effect, as if Davis were capable of inhabiting every period of her life just as fully—and with the same immediacy—as she does the present. This is a beautiful, graceful, acutely intelligent memoir, sometimes sorrowful, sometimes quietly funny, but always wide awake to the strange wonder of being.”—Kevin Brockmeier
10/01/2021
With In Love, NBA/NBCC finalist Bloom (White Houses) takes us on a painful journey as her husband retires from his job, withdraws from life, and finally receives a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's; she recalls both the love they experienced and the love it took to stand by him as he ended his life on his own terms. In The Beauty of Dusk, New York Times columnist Bruni contemplates aging, illness, and the end of the road as he describes a rare stroke that deprived him of sight in his right eye, even as he learns that he could lose sight in his left eye as well. In Aurelia, Aurélia, Lannan Literary Award-winning novelist Davis (The Silk Road) considers how living and imagining interact in a book grounded in the joys and troubles of her marriage and her husband's recent death. Raised in an ultra-orthodox Jewish household and married off at age 19 to a man she barely knew, Haart made a Brazen decision more than two decades later, surreptitiously earning enough money to break away, then entering the fashion world, and finally becoming CEO and co-owner of the modeling agency Elite World Group. Adding to all those paw-poundingly wonderful canine celebrations that keep coming our way, And a Dog Called Fig is Dublin IMPAC long-listed Canadian novelist Humphreys's paean to dogs as the ideal companion to the writing life. In The Tears of a Man Flow Inward, Burundi-born, U.S.-based Pushcart/Whiting honoree Irankunda recalls how his family and fellow villagers survived the 13-year civil war in his country—with the help, crucially, of his kind and brave mother, a Mushingantahe, or chosen village leader—and how the war destroyed Burundi's culture and traditions. As private investigator Krouse explains in Tell Me Everything, she accepted a case of alleged sexual assault at a party for college football players and recruits despite reservations owing to her own experiences with sexual violence, then saw the case become a landmark civil rights case. In Red Paint, LaPointe, a Salish poet and nonfiction author from the Nooksack and Upper Skagit Indian tribes, explains how she has sought to reclaim a place in the world for herself and her people by blending her passion for the punk rock of the Pacific Northwest and her desire to honor spiritual traditions and particularly a namesake great-grandmother who fought to preserve the Lushootseed language. Undoubtedly, book critic Newton has Ancestor Trouble: a forebear accused of witchcraft in Puritan Massachusetts, a grandfather married 13 times, a father who praised slavery and obsessed over the purity of his bloodlines, and a frantic, cat-rescuing mother who performed exorcisms, all of which made her wonder how she would turn out. In How Do I Un-Remember This? comedian/screenwriter Pellegrino draws on his big-hit podcast Everything Iconic with Danny Pellegrino (over 13.5 million downloads in 2020) as he renegotiates 1990s pop culture and moments funny, embarrassing, or painful to limn growing up closeted in a conservative Ohio community. In Black Ops, Prado portrays a life that ranges from his family's fleeing the Cuban revolution when he was seven to his retirement from the CIA as the equivalent of a two-star general while also detailing the agency's involvement over the decades in numerous "shadow wars" (200,000-copy first printing). Segall came of age as a reporter just as tech entrepreneurs began to soar, and as she interviewed these Special Characters, she also rose to become an award-winning investigative reporter and (until 2019) CNN's senior tech correspondent (75,000-copy first printing).
★ 2021-11-30
A profound meditation on grief via unglued memories and literary fragments.
Central to this brief yet stunning book is the death of Davis’ husband, who succumbed to cancer after a long struggle. The acclaimed novelist is well versed in loss. “I’d given death a lot of thought,” she writes. “It was one of my favorite topics, in liturgy and literature.” An attentive reader and erudite writer, Davis plumbs her internal archive in search of solace and clarity in the face of ineffable tragedy. She writes about her husband in the bardo, a Buddhist term that describes the liminal space between life and death—a place, she explains, where “narrative seems to happen but doesn’t.” Her husband’s memory thrums throughout the memoir, somehow both a presence and an absence. The prose is equally undefinable, caught between poetic and concrete. Like “the story unfolding inside my husband’s organs,” she writes, “there was a narrative involved that didn’t follow conventional rules.” Cross-fading vignettes abound with little correlation but remain haunted by a sense that something invisible threads them together. Digressions about Virginia Woolf and Flaubert, the TV show Lost, and Beethoven’s bagatelles all miraculously align. Coincidences buzz with fated significance, unmoored and transformed over time. The titular Aurelia was a ship Davis once rode across the Atlantic; as an adult, she would discover a novella by Gérard de Nerval with the same name, but with an accent. “Aurelia,” she explains further, “is the Latin translation of the Greek word for chrysalis…emblem of metamorphosis and hiddenness.” Regarding memory, she writes, “when someone you have lived with for a very long time dies, memory stops working its regular way—it goes crazy. It is no longer like remembering; it is, more often, like astral projection.” These disparate moments transform the memoir into something that flows more like a guided dream, rendered in daring, vulnerable prose, steeped in death but brilliantly transformative.
A transcendent work of literary divination.
