Avoid the Day

"e;Avoid the Day truly seems to me to push nonfiction memoir as far as it can go without it collapsing into a singularity and I am at a loss for words. You are just going to have to read it."e; Helen Macdonald, author of H is for HawkA surreal, high-wire act of narrative nonfiction that redefines the genre,Avoid the Dayis part detective story, part memoir, and part meditation on the meaning of lifeall told with a dark pulse of existential horror. What emerges isan unforgettable study of mortality and the artists journey.Seeking to answer the mystery of a missing manuscript by Bla Bartk, and using the investigation to avoid his fathers deathbed, award-winning magazine writer Jay Kirk heads off to Transylvania, going to the same villages where the Master, like a vampire in search of fresh plasma, had found his new material in the folk music of the peasants. With these stolen songs, Bartk redefined music in the 20thCentury. Kirk, who is also seeking to renew his writing, finds inspiration in the composers unorthodox methods, but begins to lose his tether as he sees himself in Bartks darkest and most personal work, theCantata Profana,which revolves around the curse of fathers and sons. After a near-psychotic episode under the spell of Bartk, the author suddenly finds himself on a posh eco-tourist cruise in the Arctic. There, accompanied by an old friend, now a documentary filmmaker, the two decide to scrap the documentary and make a horror flick insteadshot under the noses of the unsuspecting passengers and crew. Playing one of the main characters who finds himself inexplicably trapped on a ship at the literal end of the world,alone,and under the influence of the midnight sun, Kirk gets lost in his own cerebral maze, struggling to answer his most plaguing question: can we find meaning in experience?