Russell Persson’s These Threads Who Lead to Bramble
defies the singularity of any one genre as it braids together memory and myth
to challenge the limits of our collective imagination.
This is a book that contains multitudes—a celebration of the
forgotten marginalia of Westernized thought. Persson’s collection delves into eccentric twentieth-century American photographers, the
lives of his ancestors both distant and recent, and of the artist Egon Schiele
in prison, teetering on the edge of sanity. He interweaves the careers
of three obscure composers—Alban Berg, Erik Satie, and Anton Webern—and imagines the composer’s life based
on listening to their music, rather than the other way around. And he charts the
path of his own life from a long-ago teenage road trip, sleeping in the backs
of friends’ cars and trying to find himself inside a vast world.
As the work builds, the lines between personal memory and
collective history become ever more abstract, blending inner and outer spheres to
confront the unknowable expanse of universal existence. A must-read for fans of
Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Roland
Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.
This work includes black-and-white reproductions of Egon Schiele’s drawings, with permission from The ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna.
Kidnapped girls trapped in a remote theater surrounded by mountains and jungle are forced into illegal performances, displayed in cabinets with curiosities, their delicate limbs bound by straps, and accompanied by dancing puppets fashioned of dead children's bones.
