Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room was published by Pantheon in 2012 and applies the method of Out of Sheer Rage to cinema. The ostensible subject is Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker — a Russian science-fiction film about three men journeying through a mysterious Zone to reach a Room where one’s deepest wish is granted. Dyer follows the film scene by scene, describing what happens onscreen while digressing freely into autobiography, philosophy, and cultural criticism.
The digressions — which occupy far more of the book than the film commentary — are vintage Dyer: he discusses his own failed relationships, his ambivalence about writing, other films and books, the nature of boredom, the problem of meaning, and dozens of other subjects that connect to Stalker by the loosest of associative threads. Yet the digressions never feel random: they create a portrait of a consciousness responding to a work of art, and the accumulation of response gradually builds into something like an argument about what Stalker means and why it matters.
The subtitle — “A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room” — captures the recursive quality of the enterprise: layers of mediation between the reader and the ultimate subject (a room where wishes come true). Dyer’s book is about the film, but the film is about a journey, and the journey is about a room that may or may not do what it promises. The whole structure is a meditation on the distance between desire and fulfillment, between art and life, between the promise of meaning and its delivery.
Collecting Zona
First edition (Pantheon, New York, 2012): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First US edition in dust jacket: $15–$35
- First UK edition (Canongate, 2012): $15–$35