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Theory
Theory | Dionne Brand
7 posts | 4 read | 1 reading | 8 to read
A smart, sensual and witty novel about what happens when love and intellect are set on a collision course. This compact tour de force affirms Dionne Brand's place as one of Canada's most dazzling and influential artists. Theory begins as its narrator sets out, like many a graduate student, to write a wildly ambitious thesis on the past, present, and future of art, culture, race, gender, class, and politics--a revolutionary work that its author believes will synthesize and thereby transform the world. While our narrator tries to complete this magnum opus, three lovers enter the story, one after the other, each transforming the endeavour: first, there is beautiful and sensual Selah, who scoffs at the narrator's constant tinkering with academic abstractions; then altruistic and passionate Yara, who rescues every lost soul who crosses her path; and finally, spiritual occultist Odalys, who values magic and superstition over the heady intellectual and cultural circles the narrator aspires to inhabit. Each galvanizing love affair (representing, in turn, the heart, the head and the spirit) upends and reorients the narrator's life and, inevitably, requires an overhaul of the ever larger and more unwieldy dissertation, with results both humorous and poignant. By effortlessly telling this short, intense tale in the voice of an unnamed, ungendered (and brilliantly unreliable) narrator, Dionne Brand makes a bold statement not only about love and personhood, but about race and gender--and what can and cannot be articulated in prose when the forces that inhabit the space between words are greater than words themselves. A gorgeous, profoundly moving, word- and note-perfect novel of ideas that only a great artist at the height of her powers could write.
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review
CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian
CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian
Theory | Dionne Brand
post image
Pickpick

A novel that does what it sets out to do perfectly; but what that is isn't for everyone. An unnamed academic narrator (likely a Black woman or afab person--but deliberately ambiguous) chronicles their life's love affairs and how they interrupt/fuel their decade-long dissertation. This is all character study, with an amusing, unreliable narrator. For anyone with a background in humanities academia, THEORY is funny, strange, and thought-provoking.

45 likes2 stack adds5 comments
quote
CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian
CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian
Theory | Dionne Brand
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"The problem with not having a lover is that there is no distraction from the person I am... There's no one to fix, in other words, except me."

Omg Dionne Brand, a hit straight for the gut!

37 likes
quote
CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian
CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian
Theory | Dionne Brand
post image

"My distractions seem more compelling than the dissertation. Why is it that the mind can be caught up so heavily in feeling? We have been taught that the mind can be marshalled and feeling can be sublimated, but this, I swear, is false. Feeling is more compelling and insistent than what we call 'ideas'. Understandably, this is my own theory. No citation. Just self-diagnosis."
#QueerBooks #BlackBooks #LGBTQ #BlackVoices

32 likes2 stack adds
blurb
CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian
CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian
Theory | Dionne Brand
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Excited to start this novel by iconic Black Canadian lesbian poet Dionne Brand! The cover is so beautiful. #BlackBooks #QueerBooks #LGBTQBooks #LGBTQ #BlackLivesMatter

Megabooks It is gorgeous! 4y
39 likes1 comment
blurb
Lindy
Lindy
Theory | Dionne Brand
post image

“The bodies that are the most heavily policed in society point to the sites of freedom. Of what freedom-to-come might look like.” -Dionne Brand, speaking at #VWF2018

43 likes
review
Bookalong
Bookalong
Theory | Dionne Brand
post image
Pickpick

5🌟/5 This is a hard book to review. It was honestly unlike anything I have ever read! She guides the reader through tough subject matter. Crossing over between race, gender, politics, culture, class and love brilliantly and seamlessly. She also made the narrator nameless and genderless throughout, how facinating and brilliant! Though short this was a vivid and powerful read.

#dionnebrand #canlit #canadianauthor #bookreview #bookblogger

16 likes
review
candority
candority
Theory | Dionne Brand
post image
Pickpick

I have had the opportunity to learn from and work with Dionne Brand in the past, and she is one of the most brilliant people I have ever met. I can‘t say that I fully understand what happened in this book, but I enjoyed it anyways. Theory weaves together the all-consuming world of academia with the all-consuming world of love and attraction, and touches on a variety of issues in contemporary society.

#netgalley #canlit

74 likes