A standard element of any book review is to partially summarize a book without giving too much away, to give a sense of what others will find without telling them everything about that book. But how does one do such a thing for Russell Person’s These Threads Who Lead to Bramble, where the “sense”—the feelings, the responses, the themes hidden behind metaphor and motif—are the entire point?
The book, on its surface, can be discussed as a mix of fiction and essays—it says just that on its cover. Persson ponders a lost love and road tripping across the US; he discusses the works of composers Erik Satie, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg; he delves into the mind of an imprisoned Egon Schiele, whose consciousness is in tatters. But that’s back-of-the-book stuff, sounding as if it were a collection of essays rather than a consolidated text that uses a variety of alternate methods to create a sort of archeology of the Western self in the modern age.
Almost immediately when reading These Threads Who Lead to Bramble, I had the sense that I was confronting the ghost of Gertrude Stein, a feeling that only grew with each page. Stein’s biographies are not biographies in the traditional sense but meant to provide impressions that dig beneath the limitations of language, just as Tender Buttons is about the objects under consideration, but only in a sort of sonic sense. She is trying to get to a deeper sense of the contemplated person or object, and in this manner, Persson is her descendent. When, for instance, he writes about the composer Anton Webern, Persson writes a “biography” without researching the artist or his life; instead, he listens solely to the music and writes accordingly: “So as not to muck the rest and dream of his grandchildren he went to the front stoop to use his cigar outside and stood there in the night, the new quiet still unsure to settle, low dust in eddies few streetlamps who put tents of light down.” This is no traditional biography but, instead, an aesthetic biography, a dive into the art itself, knowing the artist through his work rather than the vice-versa, typical alternative.
Similarly, when Persson writes “The Autobiography of Egon Schiele in Prison,” he avoids all discussion of the facts regarding Schiele’s case—there is no mention of how he ended up in prison, of how he felt, of Schiele’s art, even as his prison sketches are displayed alongside the “autobiography.” Instead, we get a sort of first-person-narrated autobiographical impressionism, which looks like this: “Shaken shook loose I gather what was broughten to me, the paper and an orange. The dusk in this room is a perfect hoax. So night is always in its about to, my time is spended to arrange the time but until now. I cannot bring myself to the orange and peel off its outside.” It is, in other words, the autobiography of a person thinking, and that, really, is the book itself, a sort of biography of modern consciousness.
It’s not surprising, then, that along with thoughts of Gertrude Stein, Persson’s book had me thinking about W. G. Sebald, whose excavations of the self and of the twentieth century often seemed to be one and the same. In one long chapter of These Threads Who Lead to Bramble, “The History of American Photography,” the narrative moves in and out between discussions about artists like Tarkovsky, Giacometti, and Nijinksy and pictures the narrator has of his father and other family members, as if the division between personal and public were not as major as is often thought—a very Sebaldian thing to do.
Near the end of the book, the narrator describes the “Family of Origin” as “the first social group in which an individual is a part,” going on to say it “is one way to describe the maps we’re born with.” A book like this, with various personal histories, discussions of and responses to art, and what are at times intensely personal reminiscences from the author or his stand-in, is an attempt to map out what it means to exist today, as a fractured self in a fractured world. Persson—like Stein and Sebald before him—is certainly not going to be for everyone. But those who don’t want selfhood spoon-fed to them will find this book more than rewarding and worth the effort. It is a strange, beautiful work.
These Threads Who Lead to Bramble, by Russell Persson. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Dzanc Books, February 2025. 146 pages. $17.95, paper.
Matt Martinson teaches honors courses at Central Washington University, and occasionally reviews books for Heavy Feather. Recent fiction and nonfiction appear in Lake Effect, 1 Hand Clapping, and Coffin Bell; his piece, “Trout and Trout Remain,” received a Notable mention in Best American Essays 2024.
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