Generally considered the least lively and most bleak of casts, gray is
the taint of vagueness and uncertainty. Marking the threshold region
where luminous life seems suspended but death has not yet darkened the
horizon, it belongs to an evasive and evanescent world, carrying the
tint of smoke, fog, ashes, and dust. As the ambiguous space of thought
and remembrance where things blend and blur, gray measures the
difference between distance and proximity, shading into tinges of
hesitation, hues of taciturnity, tones of time past and lost. Thus it
may also be the spectral medium of literature itself--that grainy gas of
language.
Written with a lead pencil akin to those found in Nabokov, Rilke, Svevo,
Poe, and Dickinson, The Gray Book chronicles the vicissitudes of such
equivocal articulation--registering the graphite traces it leaves behind
but also recording the dwindling span of its life. The book situates
itself in a region beyond criticism but this side of literature,
characterized by forgetting and finitude, and investigating important
yet seemingly inaccessible "gray areas" in texts as old as those of
Homer, and as recent as those of Beckett.
Loosely arranging these literary finds according to a revision of the
four elements, The Gray Book distances itself from tradition and
treats not water but tears, not fire but vapor, not earth but grain, not
air but clouds. The narrative thus construed, proceeding in the
meandering movements of volatile thought rather than in the prudent
steps of a treatise, appears gradually affected by its subject. Themes
and facts previously confined to the realm of quoted texts leak into the
narrative itself. The border between fiction and fact slowly dissolves
as the book approaches the curious void that the author locates at the
heart of "gray literature." Shaped by an omnipresent though increasingly
unreliable narrator, The Gray Book may thus ultimately yield a poetics
cast in the form of a ghost story.
