Shame / Scham: A Collaboration (English and German Edition)
Shame may be the most perdurably uncategorizable and daring book Robert Kelly has yet published during a career containing more than sixty sui generis volumes. It is a purloined correspondence, an investigatory improvisation, an apologia, a psychological expose, a desideratum, a profundity, and jazz. Yet, Shame is a collaboration. When Birgit Kempker — a younger German writer living in Basel, Switzerland — invited Kelly to create a work together, neither knew the other except by reputation. They proceeded to communicate by e-mail for two years through sixteen exchanges, and the subject was to be shame at its most personal, prosaic, intimate, and even sometimes fetching; and shame at its most generic, couched, poetic and hallucinatory. The barrier between them was not merely not knowing one another while risking the limits of naked trust, but of surmounting age, gender, nationality and language. Birgit Kempker wrote in German, and Robert Kelly in English. Shame is a love story. A story of two tongues. Shame is a book spoken between two lovers who will never be lovers, a book of the unabashed and prised apart secret intimacy that can be laid bare against all constraint by ghostly lovers — virtual, exemplary, psychic guides to one another, and all of the rest of us.
