pickI predicted this feminist, philosophical novel about gender and creativity would be on the Giller longlist. I was wrong, but for readers like me, it‘s intellectual dynamite. Full review: https://lindypratch.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-baudelaire-fractal-by-lisa-robertso...
#shadowgiller #canlit
The descriptions of paintings in this novel are so well executed that I already could picture them in my mind before looking them up on the Internet. Above: Baudelaire‘s Mistress, Reclining. Édouard Manet, 1862
I knew very little history and certainly nothing of the Algerian War, which had not been mentioned in my mediocre education, a so-called education that had simply omitted any mention of the colonialism of the recent past. Many wars and even countries simply did not exist for me then. I was from a class that persisted in imagining that its own complacency was natural.
I awoke to the bodily recognition that I had become the author of the complete works of Baudelaire. […] Perhaps it is more precise to say that all at once, unbidden, I received the Baudelairean authorship, or that I found it within myself. This is obviously very different from being Baudelaire, which was not the case, nor my experience. I had only written his words.
The systems and infrastructures were continuing to erode, as they had been doing since the arrival of Thatcher in 1979, and the defunct industrial beauty of the 19-century train stations was no exception. Everything had been privatized or was about to be privatized except for poetry, which was worthless.
Not all of the present was accessible. Some threads would always be bunched up, tangled, hidden on the reverse side of the garment. There, unseen, they would chafe the wearer.
This morning I‘m at the round table under the linden tree, in a sweet green helmet of buzzing. Each of its pendulous flowers seems to be inhabited by a bee. They don‘t mind me—they‘re rapturously sucking nectar. I‘m at the core of a breezy chandelier of honey.
My predictions for the Scotiabank Giller prize longlist are posted: https://lindypratch.blogspot.com/2020/09/my-2020-giller-longlist-prediction.html...
Fingers crossed that my favourites will be on the official list when it‘s announced tomorrow.
#shadowgiller #canlit
The bridge was now art perhaps, thanks to its unifying covering; also, though, in a delicious inversion of the Baudelairean proportion, the bridge had, beneath the soft textile, become flesh, imbued with mysterious and occult passion.
I‘m writing this story backwards, from a shack in middle age. I sit and wait for as long as it takes until I intuit the shape of a sentence. Sometimes I feel that it is the room that writes. But it needs the hot nib of my pronoun.
I have to take a moment before reading onward. This typography has put a song in my head and I must wait for the music to disperse before continuing. Can you guess what song?
The Baudelaire Fractal | 
