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#PoetryMatters Day 3: #Unbending
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.
