The Longcut

 

I received a copy of this release from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Title: The Longcut

Author: Emily Hall

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Release Date: 5.10.22

Publisher’s Summary 

The narrator of The Longcut is an artist who doesn't know what her art is. As she gets lost on her way to a meeting in an art gallery, walking around in circles in a city she knows perfectly well, she finds herself endlessly sidetracked and distracted by the question of what her work is and how she'll know it when she sees it.

Her mental peregrinations take her through the elements that make up her life: her dull office job where she spends the day moving items into a "completed" column, insomniac nights in her so-called studio (also known as her tiny apartment), encounters with an enigmatic friend who may or may not know her better than she knows herself. But wherever she looks she finds only more questions--what is the difference between the world and the photographed world, why do objects wither in different contexts, what is Cambridge blue--that lead her further away from the one thing that really matters.

An extraordinary feat of syntactical dexterity and comic ingenuity, The Longcut is ultimately a story of resistance to easy answers and the place of art and the artist in the world.

My Review

This novella reminds me of another novella I read in college. I believe it was simply titled"Art" (I don't remember, nor can I find the author.) Both books are heavy on the philosophy of "what is art?" and are great for stretching the mind. While each book is short, they both took me a long time to read. I'd find myself drifting off, lost in thought, trying to find my own answers to the questions the books were asking. I enjoyed Longcut but it did take me a while to get in the groove with the stream of consciousness writing style and run-on sentences. I recommend this to anyone who is an artist or interested in the artistic process.