Hurry Along

$15.00

This is a novel which is difficult to describe because it’s told with flashbacks and fragments, as memories becoming abstracted, exploring new territories and new beauty.

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Description

This is a novel which is difficult to describe because of its complexity. Essentially, it tells the story of a family, but it’s told with flashbacks and fragments in such a way that a reader may easily get lost. Nonetheless, it’s a good sense of being lost, a sense in which one explores new territories and discovers new beauty.

“Poet and painter Plimpton’s fiction debut is a luscious non-narrative map of shifting emotional and physical landscapes born out of the quotidian lives of people, trees, animals, beaches, and more. Plimpton usually makes her way through the book via the eyes of individuals somehow intertwined, but just as suddenly as a world is crafted through Plimpton’s effortless prose, it shifts or disappears entirely. The novel’s vibrant, contoured world grants its every facet a degree of agency—from the effects of domesticity to the weather itself—rendering characters’ inner states via impression as opposed to exposition. What might become tedious in the hands of a less skilled writer is achieved by Plimpton with aplomb—because the book’s constituent elements are at once familiar and capable of unending transformation, the sensation of reading Plimpton’s prose is that of wandering vividly decorated corridors of imagination. Most rewarding is Plimpton’s refusal to inhibit her evolving creations; she allows them to develop perpetually, and then drop delicately away, like a flower’s petals, “fluttered” by the breeze that we feel, but cannot see.” -Publishers Weekly

 

Sarah Plimpton is a painter and a poet. She divides her time between New York City and France. Her poems and prose have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and the Denver Quarterly, among other magazines. A collection of poems has been translated into French, L’Autre Soleil, and published by LeCormier, Belgium. Her paintings and artist’s books are in various museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum, of Art.

Additional information

Weight 6.4 oz
Dimensions 5.2 × 0.5 × 8.8 in
Format

Paperback

Author

Sarah Plimpton

ISBN

978-1-929355-77-8

Amazon

http://a.co/aOhUPp7

Smashwords

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/158684

Original Language

English

Publish Date

4/1/2012

Page/Word Count

128 pages

Praise

always hurrying along in anticipation of new delights (and possible clarifications); but the condition of the delights is necessarily a tantalizing mystery; and that, and her grandson in unpredictable fragments. The prose remains as lively as ever, but I never do, but the fragments, clarified only by an explicitly metaphorical commentary on the passage of the seasons. Reading, her daughter, I repeatedly tell myself that I should stop and make a rational summary of what is happening, is the greatest delight of all in this ravishing and generous work. –Harry Mathews, rarely explained, remain shrouded in ambiguity, ultimately

Imprint

PBS

3 reviews for Hurry Along

  1. Harry Mathews

    Hurry Along presents us with many ordinary images and scenes made vivid and captivating by their writing; these alternate with dramatic and complex scenes that tell the story of the book the family life of a grandmother, her daughter, and her grandson in unpredictable fragments. The prose remains as lively as ever, but the fragments, rarely explained, remain shrouded in ambiguity, clarified only by an explicitly metaphorical commentary on the passage of the seasons. Reading, I repeatedly tell myself that I should stop and make a rational summary of what is happening, but I never do, always hurrying along in anticipation of new delights (and possible clarifications); but the condition of the delights is necessarily a tantalizing mystery; and that, ultimately, is the greatest delight of all in this ravishing and generous work.

  2. Midwest Book Review

    Life happens tar too fast to truly break it down and understand everything about it. ‘Hurry Along’ is a novel from Sarah Plimpton that seeks to explore the fast-paced nature of our world and our attempts to put it all together. A riveting read that will do well in entertaining and making one think about the world, ‘Hurry Along’ is a strong pick for any literary fiction collection.

  3. Paul Auster

    This is a novel about looking and breathing, about being alive in one’s own skin, about the physical properties of colors and flowers and light, about the transformative powers of the human eye. Plimpton’s strange mutating sentences make me think of Cezanne’s brush strokes, the exactitude of a rendered world at the precise instant it is perceived. Quietly, ever so quietly, Hurry Along is one of the most radical books I have read in years.

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