The Ancestry of Objects

by Tatiana Ryckman

Overview

A young woman meets a man at a restaurant. They exchange words only briefly, but by the end of the week he has entered her world with an intensity rivaled only by her desire to end her life.

Told with the lyrical persistence of a Greek chorus, The Ancestry of Objects unravels the story of the unnamed narrator’s affair with David: married, graying, and in whose malcontent she sees her need for change. Religion, the mystery of her absent mother, and the ghosts of her grandparents haunt her meetings with him. Memories start, stop, and loop back in on themselves to form the web of her identity and her voice—something she’s looked for her whole life. Nothing can fill the voids of time and loss; not God, not memory, not family, and certainly not love.

At once intensely sensory and urgently erotic, The Ancestry of Objects parses the multiplicity of selves who become a part of us as we push to survive. This is Ryckman – a master of the obsessive, desirous, complex exhaustion of human relationships – in peak form.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781646050253
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	09/08/2020
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Tatiana Ryckman is the author of I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do) (Future Tense), and two chapbooks of prose; and the editor of Austin-based publisher Awst Press. She has been a writer in residence at Yaddo, Arthub, and 100W. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Lit Hub, Paper Darts, Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, and other publications. Tatiana can be found on airplanes or at tatianaryckman.com.

Read an Excerpt

“We mourn too the end of endless days filled with the delicate dictation of biological errors. We miss in advance the responsibility to witness the repeated failure of body after body described by the doctor; we meditate on the comforting weight of everyone’s fragile lives as narrated through headphones, the familiar cadence of a woman’s voice reading without emotion the tumors and fractures lit up from behind comma from within—the voice of quick and unremarkably slow deaths and injuries of strangers so ingrained in our mind that they seem to foretell our own slow death period. Her calm voice the one we use to describe our frustrations with traffic in the street outside the window, the voice that narrates the news of the day. The woman’s voice, the invisible doctor’s voice, recites the brokenness of strangers as we digest our breakfast. It is the voice we use when we defend ourself against the drawl of ancient well-meaning reproaches. Our grandparents’ easy unkindness composing the endless loop of our childhood mistake. The mistake of existing. And in the bathroom mirror, the emotionless voice of dictation is ours when we unscold ourself: We are notbad. We are notsinful.”

Editorial Reviews

One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2020

"Ryckman’s The Ancestry of Objects accomplishes a difficult and compelling tension with lyrical prose that ropes readers into a nuanced depiction of the pleasure and pain of human relationships. She renders the figures of her fragmented novel with a stark tenderness, reflecting the beauty and unattractiveness of desire. There are no villains, no heroes, just complications between people whose flaws will draw readers to recognize themselves and our shared yearning to be known." —Donald Quist, author of Harbors and For Other Ghosts

"Tatiana Ryckman's second novel, The Ancestry of Objects, takes us deep into the labyrinth of eros and its manias. There is adultery, there is loneliness and abandonment, there is shame and longing, a family of ghosts, and there is a woman learning how to live and finally, how to love herself." —Micheline Marcom, author of The Brick House

"I’ve always loved Ryckman’s fiction, but nothing in the idiosyncratic originality of her short stories prepared me for her stunning novel with its dark eroticism, its plunge into depths of loneliness, and its quest for paradoxical liberation. Her extraordinary narrator lives in a state of erasure but thinks as plural: the social self for whom everything is always “fine”; the guilty, sinful self as defined by the now-dead grandparents; the self who needs to be seen through the outside eye of the absent lover, the absent God; and most of all, the self who feels dead in daily life and alive when courting an exuberant annihilation. In reading this powerful and disturbing short novel, I found myself splitting as well, into the reader who could not put these pages down, and the reader who had to, in order to regain her equilibrium and catch her throttled breath." —Diane Lefer, award-winning author of California Transit, playwright, and activist

"'It is us—our fear and our shame and our pride—and no one else that haunts us,' says the narrator (or narrators) of this harrowing, startling novel, told in the first person plural. From the moment I started reading, I felt the presence of T.R. Ryckman's unmistakable genius. You could compare it to Ben Marcus, Alexandra Kleeman, Brian Evanson or Carmen Machado, but really The Ancestry of Objects is in a category of its own." —Jess Row

“Ryckman writes with cool, tightly packed precision on the futile ways people try to fill the emptiness and absence of life with objects and religion and desperate acts. … A hypnotizing, bleak account of the ways people trap themselves in their own minds.” —Kirkus Reviews

"Readers of lyrical, genre-bending fiction will be spellbound." —Publishers Weekly

"A dizzying story of girl meets boy, meets her all-encompassing desire, meets her equally fervent wish to end her life, meets the mysteries and ghosts that have circled her whole life, meets . . . so much more. The girl in question, an unnamed narrator, has wells of need and want at her core, for which the boy, David, is an unwitting receptacle. Told in fragments, and memories, and various voices, The Ancestry of Objects whirls the reader through the narrator’s many selves as she attempts to reckon with the voids that we all contend with." —Julia Hass, Lit Hub Editorial Fellow

"The Ancestry of Objects is both urgent and lyrical, braiding together themes of consent and control, family ghosts, and epic tragedy. A young woman starts an affair with a married man she meets at a restaurant. Within that same week, she can’t stop thinking about ending her own life. Tatiana Ryckman’s darkly erotic new novel questions what it means to survive, and the ways in which we split our identities to do so." — "20 Small Press Books from 2020 You Might Have Missed,"Electric Literature

"This fractured, compacted text brings into question the inevitability of a life. Because a house—a home—a body, a life, is loaded with the refuse of our ancestors, the weight of domesticity and its many institutions, given form on these pages in peeling cupboards, worn formica, water rings and picked pile carpets. And to live is to carry those burdens."––Rose Hingham-Stainton,Ache Magazine

“Told with a technique that’s at once formally modern and timeless, Tatiana Ryckman’s new novel tells the story of an affair which takes both of its participants into extreme and harrowing places. The result is an unsettling and powerful story, told in a unique way.”—VOL.1 BROOKLYN 

"As of late - and I’ll thank Jenny Offill's thin, unnamed narrator works of genius for this and the pandemic push to gorge myself on as much variety as humanly possible- I’ve been drawn to smaller, more “fragmented” possibly - gasp - experimental work. Such as The Ancestry of Objects and its story of an affair told through the ephemera of such thing. This is no “chonker” but Ryckman’s prodding and dissecting of a tryst sounds fascinating. Also, the cover reminds me of books from the 1990s you might find in a, ahem, Lil’ Library on a Midwestern suburban street. Which, honestly, would’ve been all I needed.”—Noah Sanders,The Racket

"The book was heartbreaking to me at every turn. Even when there is pleasure, it feels debased. It is a rumination on being separate from and observing a life that isn't wanted, and even if examined, not understood... As I read the book I kept coming back to loneliness and how this was such a profound theme for so many during the pandemic, isolated from loved ones, alone at home, unable to hug, to wander, to feel any kind of real interaction." —Ben Tanzer, Lit Reactor

On I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do):

“(Ryckman) has joined the likes of Clarice Lispector, Claudia Rankine, and John Berger.” —Matthew Dickman, author of Mayakovsky’s Revolver

Ryckman has written the anti-love story within all of us. A book so earnest and sharp in its examination of heartbreak, it will make you ache for all the people you haven’t even loved yet.” —T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls and No Tokens

“Keenly felt and fiercely written. Tatiana Ryckman is a revelation.” —Jennifer duBois, author of Cartwheel

“Tatiana Ryckman has written a wonder; a remarkably accomplished work of such keen observation and emotional complexity as to rival those texts—Maggie Nelson’s Bluets come to mind—with which it shares some literary DNA. Ryckman is a ruthless investigator of reckless desire … I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do) asks—newly, stunningly, with precise prose chiseled from stone—what it is we’re meant to do when the source of our appetite is beyond the realm of our own cognition, and following this narrator in pursuit of the unanswerable is a reading experience as gutting as it is thrilling. One finishes this book with the simple thought: Now here is a person.” —Vincent Scarpa

The Ancestry of Objects is both urgent and lyrical, braiding together themes of consent and control, family ghosts, and epic tragedy. A young woman starts an affair with a married man she meets at a restaurant. Within that same week, she can’t stop thinking about ending her own life. Tatiana Ryckman’s darkly erotic new novel questions what it means to survive, and the ways in which we split our identities to do so." —Electric Literature

"Ryckman’s thickly lyrical language declines to commit to being either poetry or prose...The Ancestry of Objects is a meditation on social performance and the impossibility of presenting yourself in a singular role." — Sarah McEachern, Full Stop

“This quick novella recalls elements of weird Suburban melodrama...with a biting feminist urgency of disassociated subject...Ryckman’s prose is spare, occasionally moving into ironic detachment, and deadpan commentary...Ryckman delivers a virtuoso study in erotics: alluring, heavy throated, and weirdly sad.” — Joseph Houlihan, Entropy Mag

From the Publisher

2020-06-17
In this spare novel, a young woman copes with the yawning emptiness of her life by having an affair.

By the time the narrator, referred to only as “we,” meets David in a bar, she has already lost her job in medical dictation and, faced with the prospect of coming to terms with her own life, is now fixated on killing herself. Her life is one of complete isolation—she has no friends and lives alone in the house she inherited from the grandparents who raised her, severely devout Christians whose constant judgment of her during her childhood replays in her head ceaselessly. “You can’t go alone, the grandmother says.…You can’t leave the house like that. What will people think. They’ll find your body in the lake. You need a man to take you/show you/protect you/tell you how to be.” Just as inescapable is the clutter they left behind, which forms the fabric of the narrator’s existence as she spends her days lying listlessly in bed or on the floor: the “glittering linoleum, the puzzles with missing pieces and bars of old soap, the rusted razors dropped into the wall behind the medicine cabinet and decades of dust woven into the thinning thread of the curtains.” When she and David begin having sex—his wife, Lara, is away visiting her sick mother—he moves in and out of the woman’s house freely and without warning, and she longs to be truly known by him even as she acts detached. Ryckman writes with cool, tightly packed precision on the futile ways people try to fill the emptiness and absence of life with objects and religion and desperate acts. Her rendering of the dynamics of an affair, which is so often an attempt to escape oneself, is especially keen: “Each time David comes, the guilt shrinks so that the noose of shame which ties us together diminishes into habit. As the guilt diminishes so does the pleasure. And with the pleasure our worth.”

A hypnotizing, bleak account of the ways people trap themselves in their own minds.

Kirkus Reviews