The fragmented, the destructured, the constellated – that’s my new territory! Reading a review of Amy Liptrot’s new book, The Instant, in The Guardian it strikes me that she’s going somewhere new for her and that there’s more to this than I thought, perhaps.
It is a fragmentary, episodic account of Liptrot’s time in Berlin, which took inspiration from poetry and song lyrics, from the internet-led alt-lit movement …
“A lot of books that have been published in the last five years or so are quite fragmentary,” Liptrot says. “And I definitely think that’s a product of living on Twitter, and being distracted and how our attention spans are. But also the way that we’re sophisticated enough as readers to process different information in parallel.”
Process different information in parallel. Having just read Rebecca Watson’s little scratch, which certainly processes different information in parallel, I’m interested to see how far Liptrot goes down this road with her new book. I’ll be talking about The Instant and Little Scratch and a lot more related stuff soon.
