The subtitle of Avoid the Day is "A New Nonfiction in Two Movements," which hints at two aspects of the book: it has two distinctly different parts, and it uses music as one of its key tropes.
Avoid the Day starts out strong with an evocative chapter about Béla Bartók visiting Vermont in the 1940s. From its first paired image of a train's headlight piercing the forest and a car's headlight winding downhill to converge on the station, the chapter creates a gothic atmosphere, limns Bartók's character, suggests that his use of folk melodies makes him a vampire, and sets out the themes of the book (the relationship between authentic experience and meaning). The rest of the first "movement" describes the author's visit to Transylvania and his interest in a missing Bartók manuscript.
In the second "movement," the author joins his friend on an Arctic cruise, where they attempt to make a guerrilla horror film. What does this have to do with the first part? Well, you see, the friends went to the Arctic in pursuit of authentic experience, just like Bartók went to Transylvania in pursuit of authentic folk music.
I learned a lot about Bartók and about the Romanian countryside in the first few chapters, but the author soon drifts off course with cut-rate Hunter Thompson-isms. One motivation for his trips is avoiding his father's deathbed, and stories of his relationship with his father become more prominent as the story goes on. Unfortunately, his descriptions of his supposed mental anguish fall flat and remain unbelievable. I hope that his eventual suicidal ideations are fiction, because I was unmoved by them.
In short, the book started as an offbeat five-star hybrid that slowly but surely got worse as it went along.
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