The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes

NR: So, my introduction to Didion had been through her essays, especially those in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968). While these plot details (and others) are important, it’s the incredibly glinty way the book unfolds, sentence by sentence, that makes it something you just can’t shrug off after reading.ĬW: What caused you to pick up Play It As It Lays for the first time, and what was that initial read like for you? It is from her point of view, mostly, that we learn in fragments the details of the journey that led her here: her divorce from her filmmaker husband Carter Lang, the fragility of her four-year old daughter Kate, the abortion Carter forces her to have. Nicholas Rombes: The novel is about 31-year old Maria Wyeth, who is confined in a psychiatric hospital.

He works in Detroit, Michigan.Ĭolin Winnette: Will you provide a brief description (3 sentences or less) of this book? Something to ground anyone who hasn’t read it. He is also the author of Ramones, from Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series.

His work has appeared in The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Filmmaker Magazine, where he serves as a contributing editor. Nicholas Rombes is the author of the novel The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing, out from Two Dollar Radio. Nicholas suggested Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. What ensues is an atmospheric, cryptic extrapolation of movies and how they intertwine with life, and the forgotten films that curse the lost librarian still.Colin Winnette admires the writer Nicholas Rombes, so he asked Nicholas to suggest a book. Laing agrees to speak with the journalist, but only through the lens of the cinema.

Unsure at first whether Laing is a pseudonym or some sort of Hollywood boogeyman, a journalist manages to track the forgotten man down to a motel on the fringe of the Wisconsin wilds. Roberto Acestes Laing was highly regarded by acclaimed directors around the globe for his keen eye, appreciation for eccentricity, and creativity in interpretation. For the reader, there is little we can know for sure, but this is what makes the book so exciting.' -Irish Times Synopsis In the mid-'90s a rare-film librarian at a state university in Pennsylvania mysteriously burned his entire stockpile of film canisters and disappeared. In the process, Rombes found the freedom of fiction pushing him towards a new type of writing. *A Best Book of 2014 -Flavorwire,Entropy Magazine,Book Riot 'The novel is an attempt to write about film through fiction, engaging both art forms at once with the analytic mind of the academic and the imagination of the storyteller.

The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes