Review | Tree Abraham’s book ‘Cyclettes’: A millennial view of the world from bike height

“Cyclettes,” the new book from Ottawa-born, Brooklyn-based writer and book designer Tree Abraham, is a small wonder of a book, a brightly polished gem. Arranged as a collection of tiny numbered sections (Pieces? Chapters? Essays?) with accompanying images, “Cyclettes” charts the course of Abraham’s life and thought through her involvement with, and love for, bicycles and bicycling.

This is not, it should be noted, a sporty or gear-fetishistic account of a cycling life. Rather, it is a dazzling distillation of life experiences and philosophy from the perspective of one who has spent considerable time riding, taking in the world “viewed from bike-height that couldn’t be replicated.”

The book begins with a photograph of a little girl seated comfortably, almost defiantly, on a tricycle. “I look determined, though too tiny to pump the pedals,” Abraham writes. “Where would I have hoped to have gone I couldn’t have known then. It is May 11, 1992, and I am 26.5 months old.” Her first bicycle is “sparkly magenta with squishy white handlebars and a coaster brake system.” The accompanying images, stills from an 8 mm video, show her riding with training wheels, with the immediacy of the Zapruder film.

The book as a whole unfolds in the same manner, images serving as counterpoint or support for textual passages, tracing her growing up, her travels around the world, her retreats to country life, her eventual finding herself, and, of course, her succession of bicycles. The interplay between words and images is powerful and effective, and lends the book a tremendous value as object, something to be dipped into and flipped through once it is read.

Abraham’s writing, however, is where the book accretes most of its force. Whether writing about the Fibonacci sequence (the so-called ‘golden ratio,’ which, among other things, gives form to ammonites, as pictured on the book’s cover) or her memories of growing up, the book rings with a tightly controlled lyricism, a spare significance reminiscent of Jenny Offill’s book “Dept. of Speculation.” Describing her late-night rides home from a job at Domino’s Pizza, for example, Abraham writes, “the air smelled like fresh-cut grass and felt like chilled glass. The ride was my buffer between worlds, a heralding to summers when time spent outside was confined only by the rising and setting sun.”

Abraham writes, early in the book, of “slow bike races” with her sisters, requiring “poise and micro-movements to keep from tipping over.” That control is on full display in “Cyclettes,” as Abraham hints at relationships and their costs, of situations and their resolutions, without explaining or expanding, leaving the reader with a deeper sense of mystery, and appreciation for those questions. Who, for example, is Virginia, with whom Abraham spends a day biking? “I wanted to fill my lungs up enough to hold that day in forever, to bend time toward a love I would never own.” Of course we want to know more about the house she moved into in Park Slope, “the House of Little Women, all there growing up and into ourselves, moving between being friends, sisters, mothers, therapists, comedians, storytellers, teachers, students, hype girls,” but the suggestion, the few details we glean, are enough to reflect the importance of the situation.

In this way, “Cyclettes” is something of a journey by bicycle itself, a slow roll with an elevated perspective, capturing images and experiences as we go, losing ourselves in thoughts and philosophy, feeling a keen sense of freedom, of joy, of connection. It’s a wonderful, and truly unique, reading experience.

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