The Scent of Light

Gunnars work is as though designed for handselling: These novellas, previously published only in Canada, were the underground books of their time, smuggled over borders, beloved by booksellers—indeed, they were the tomes booksellers didn’t want to pass on to just any random customer: can a bookseller just keep a book for themselves? We hope you don’t… Autofiction before such a term existed: These works by writer, poet and painter Kristjana Gunnars presaged the work of writers like Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ben Lerner, and Sheila Heti.  For readers of Duras’ The Lover, Michael Ontaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, anything by Roland Barthes, and Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal. Kazim Ali wrote the introduction There’s a pleasant 80s/90s vibe to these books, like the film An Unbearable Lightness of Being or long letters sent by mail, coin telephones, train rides unfettered by noise…. Gunnars has written in dialogue with thoughts and poems and works of Italo Calvino; Hélène Cixous; Annie Dillard; Hermann Hesse; Clarise Lispector; Toni Morrison; Alain Robbe-Grillet; Christa Wolf; W.B Yeats; Antonin Artaud; Jean Cocteau; Northrop Frye; Martin Heidegger; Susan Howe; Fredric Jameson; Søren Kierkegaard; Julia Kristeva; Anaïs Nin; Marcel Proust; Virginia Woolf, and others.