Zona: A Book About a Journey to a Room

Geoff Dyer's latest work of nonfiction, Zona, investigates his obsession with Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's dour masterpiece Stalker, a film which has haunted Dyer since he first saw it on its release in 1979. Zona has a cleverly straightforward premise: Dyer sets out to reconstruct the film by creating a frame-by-frame narrative which carefully expands on the film's simple plot—a character named Stalker guides two clients into the Zone, a room that has the potential to fulfill a person's deepest desires. Dyer unpacks the film's slow, single-take camera shots with thought-provoking discussions that range from analyses of cinematographic choices to the possible implications of each character's gestures. Dyer also leaves plenty of room for his hilarious digressions, footnoting the text with insightful personal anecdotes, freely associative thoughts on literary and filmic allusions, and heartbreaking historical information about how the film was made, including the fact that Tarkovsky, his wife, and Alexander Kaidanovsky (the film's star), all died from cancer that was most likely related to toxic chemicals they were exposed to during the making of the film. With Zona, Dyer not only illuminates his personal artistic experience through engaging with film, he may well have ushered in a new genre of nonfiction.