Does Geoff Dyer really know everything? In addition to his exceptional novels, his nonfiction subjects include John Berger, D.H. Lawrence, yoga, jazz and photography, and now Zona sets him off on another diverting journey--to describe, explain and appreciate Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker. It really doesn't matter if you have never seen this much-studied masterpiece, because Dyer walks us frame by frame through the film's opening black-and-white metaphorical journey until it transitions into color as the Stalker guides us into the magical "zone." (Sound familiar? In a footnote, Dyer observes that "similarities between Stalker and The Wizard of Oz have been widely remarked on... or so I'm told. I've never seen [it]... and obviously have no intention of making good that lack now.")
The pleasures of reading Dyer are found in personal asides that connect his ostensible subject to a myriad of tangential subjects. In one five-page span, he mentions Burning Man, T.S. Eliot, Walker Evans, Heidegger, Richard Widmark and Lars von Trier. (Discussing the latter's film Antichrist, Dyer is ruthless: "[It] is daft in the way all horror films are daft... it's nonsense, a highly crafted diminution of the possibilities of cinema.") When he notes that Stalker's last scene "redeems, makes up for, every bit of gore, every wasted special effect, all the stupidity in every film made before or since," we can't help but search out the desolate Russian film to see it for ourselves... Dyer is that good. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.