Marream Krollos plays with the tension between the voice of the lonely “I” produced by the urban experience and the polyphony of the city itself. A city is a chorus and a collection of traces; it is a way of being with others and the concretization of the social divisions that keep people apart

Marream Krollos, Big City, FC2, 2018.           
excerpt
A Date In the City






Marream Krollos’s Big City is astructurally innovative work of prose composed of vignettes, verse, dialogues, monologues, and short stories. Alone, they are fragments, but together they offer a glimpse of the human condition and form a harmonized narrative of desire, loneliness, and beauty. Through language that builds, destroys, and violates, Krollos maps the geography of our contemporary condition, a haunting meditation on human togetherness and isolation.
Krollos plays with the tension between the voice of the lonely “I” produced by the urban experience and the polyphony of the city itself. A city is a chorus and a collection of traces; it is a way of being with others and the concretization of the social divisions that keep people apart. As a lifelong city dweller, Krollos is obsessed with the way that cities shape our experiences of the world, our ideas about inside and outside and self and other.
By mapping the emotional highs and lows of particular (though often anonymous) beings, the book creates a geography of the urban consciousness. The sensation of reading this lyric work of fiction is akin to how one experiences an attentive walk in an unknown city: one becomes attuned to the tenor of its many voices, how the languages lift and flourish, and how the micro and macro became integrally linked.

“Big City by Marream Krollos is a stunning novel. By turns tender, strange, and fierce, it is always achingly honest, always surprising, and often, just when it needs to be, very funny. I thought of Italo Calvino, Roberto Bolaño, and Renee Gladman while I was reading it. I thought too of explorers and cartographers and strangers sleeping and waking and walking in sunlight. What beautiful, powerful writing this is.” - Laird Hunt


“Marream Krollos’s city is place of aloneness and longing. With an obsessive, unforgettable voice (and a rare intellectual rigor), Krollos explores the bottomless antipathy her city dwellers feel for themselves. Big City is an amazing and ferocious book.” —Brian Kiteley

“Lonely, menaced, loveless, longing, people sing the city into existence. They ‘squawk and squirt words’; they 'spit on every inch of this concrete.’ Reading Marream Krollos is ‘to withdraw amongst many,’ to become anonymous and personal, to hear voices that contain ‘all forms of palpable weather.’ Read her. Every building in Big City opens up into a bridge that is a sentence that reaches from one body toward another: a plea, a threat, an offering.”—Joanna Ruocco




The dissertation is a creative prose project entitled “Big City.” The book will be divided into four sections. It consists of sets of twelve vignettes with the same titles that are interspersed within their sections, as well as longer poetic prose pieces, and twelve short stories. The first section contains twelve vignettes, each under the title of “People in the city are alone in their beds.” People’s lives are difficult to “get going,” so are books, and so are cities. The hope is that the voices will create a sense the necessary masses that are the city. The first section of the book also contains two longer pieces entitled “A man in the city is writing a story on a bus” and “There are horses and lights in the city.” These segments are intended to capture the movement that is possible in a big city, that is possible in language, as well as become those singular structures, or monuments, that set a city apart. Throughout the text movement of thought is reflected, and reflects back on, the organization of the text itself. The first section also includes vignettes entitled “A woman in a city misses a man in another city.” These vignettes are as close as the book comes to telling a cohesive plot driven story. There is a progression of story line through the thoughts of the “woman” that eventually ends the full cycle of the book. The woman misses a man she fell in love with after she spent one day with him in his city, and so wants him to visit her in her city. The next section is twelve short stories told in different forms, from third person omniscient to dialogue only. All the stories are located by the fact that the characters, or voices, involved live in a city. The third section contains three sets of twelve vignettes. The first twelve vignettes are entitled “Things that can only happen in the city.” There proper names are used tell little mini life stories and situations that can only occur in cities. The next twelve vignettes entitled “There are all kinds of people in the city” are used to explore race and diversity issues in dialogue and thought only. And vignettes entitled “Why is the city beautiful?” set out to give different perspectives on what creates a sense of aesthetics in such an unnatural environment. The fourth section of the book is twelve longer vignettes entitled “The other cities” narrated in the same voice as the one used in “A girl in the city misses a boy in another city.” The texts ends when the “woman” has gone to the “his” city and to another unnamed city and has come back to her own alone still. - https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/347/