Douglas Messerli; My Year 2002: Love, Death, and Transfiguration
Series No.: 257
ISBN: 978-1-55713-425-7, Pages: 496
In his My Year series, Douglas Messerli employs his own personal encounters and memories as a ground to seek out and discuss important events and issues of the day. Although each volume ranges over a wide variety of events and experiences, there is an intuited continuity throughout that results in a fascinatingly coherent reading experience.
The 2002 volume is devoted to those largest of matters: life and death, with the possibility, of course, of the spiritual or at least intellectual exultation which we all seek between those swings that define a being. The death of Douglas Messerli's father was the central occurrence that brought these concerns forward, but there were numerous other events -- the deaths of filmmakers Billy Wilder and John Frankenheimer, whose celebrated films often explored just these issues, and of the poets John Wieners and Ece Ayhan, whose lyrics almost always explored love and death and sexual transformation; the re-publication, after many years of being out of print, of the great Norwegian novelist Aksel Sandemose's psychological exploration of love and death, The Werewolf; and the author's "rereading" of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, James Agee's A Death in the Family, and of one of the most well-known of films, The Third Man, a story almost entirely about a faked and a subsequently real death -- all of which contributed to the historian-memoirist's sense that 2002 was a year in which to attend to these subjects.
In a year devoted to living, loving, and dying, finally, it was perhaps inevitable that the author, himself, would be diagnosed with the disease (prostrate cancer) which killed his father.
In addition to his My Year books, Messerli is the author of the fiction Letters from Hanusse, collections of poetry First Words, After, Bow Down, Maxims from My Mother's Milk and Dark, plays (under the name Kier Peters) such as The Confirmation, Past Present Future Tense and A Dog Tries to Kiss the Sky, and criticism Reading Films. He is the editor of Green Integer, formerly Sun & Moon Press. In 2004 he was named Officier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.