Description

Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, mystery – Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman’s long awaited first original book, a kaleidoscopic study of the late West German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982). Written quickly under a self-imposed deadline in the spirit of Fassbinder himself, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as a pivotal figure in the late 1970s moment between late modernism and the advent of postmodernism and the digital revolution. Compelling, beautifully written and genuinely moving, echoing the fragmentary and reflective works of writers like Barthes and Cioran, this is a story that has everything: sex, drugs, art, the city, cinema and revolution.

Publisher Review

'Ian Penman is an ideal critic, one who invites you in, takes your coat, and hands you a drink as he sidles up to his topic. He has a modest mien, a feathery way with a sentence, a century's worth of adroit cultural connections at the ready, and a great well of genuine passion, which quickly raises the temperature.' - Lucy Sante, author of The Other Paris 'This is a wonderful book, and a surprisingly encouraging one too. Acute in its glancing survey of Fassbinder's films, it also engages the early Seventies as a moment of ideological dishevelment that refuses to pass. If Penman lingers over those years in his own taut and revealing way, that is partly because they produced a kind of critical thought that, having not yet been squared up to fit the academic conveyor belt, could be rarified, speculative and experimental while also remaining closely engaged with political reality. Fassbinder is a great model for anyone puzzling over how we might remember as well as think and act in this chaotic time.' - Patrick Wright, author of The Sea View Has Me Again 'Ian Penman - critic, essayist, mystical hack and charmer of sentences like they're snakes - is the writer I have hardly gone a week without reading, reciting, summoning to mind. The writer without whom, etc.' - Brian Dillon, author of Affinities 'The eight pieces have a depth and expansiveness that transcend their origin as book reviews, several of them cannily commissioned by someone at the London Review of Books who saw his potential as a long-form essayist. ... What gets us home, as it were, is Penman's verve, and his eagerness to make us listen to the records as attentively as he does. ... his essays on James Brown, Charlie Parker and Prince aren't definitive; they are only inimitable.' -Anthony Quinn, Guardian (Praise for It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track) 'It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track summons the lives and times of several extravagantly damaged musical geniuses and near-geniuses in (mainly) the brutal context of mid-century America - its racial atrocities, its venality, its murderous conformities. Ian Penman writes an exact, evocative prose as surprising as improvised jazz in its fluid progress from music criticism to social commentary to biography and back. He's found a way to be erudite without pedantry, entertaining without pandering. His ear for mesmerizing nuance is unmatched by any music critic alive.' -Gary Indiana, author of Three Month Fever (Praise for It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track) 'Consistently told me stuff I didn't know about stuff I thought I knew. No other 'music writer' combines such lightness of touch with such depths of diving.' -John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead (Praise for It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track) 'At his best, Penman exemplifies the art of effective music criticism: neither comprehensive nor hagiographical, his portraits of pop-cultural figures have a unique richness.' -K Biswas, New Statesman (Praise for It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track) 'Ian Penman's work has the tone, and the texture, and the complexities of the music and musicians he talks about, whether it's Steely Dan laughing up their sleeves, the thorny declines of John Fahey and James Brown, or Elvis's conflicted southern manners. It's sharp and incisive but also full of love; it is beautiful writing.' -Bob Stanley, author of Yeah Yeah Yeah (Praise for It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track)