Insel

by Mina Loy

“He has an evening suit, but never an occasion to wear it, so he puts it on when he paints his pictures.”

Insel, the only novel by the surrealist master Mina Loy, is a book like no other—about an impossible friendship amid the glamorous artistic bohemia of 1930s Paris.

German painter Insel is a perpetual sponger and outsider—prone to writing elegant notes with messages like “Am starving to death except for a miracle—three o’clock Tuesday afternoon will be the end”—but somehow writer and art dealer Mrs. Jones likes him.

Together, they sit in cafés, hatch grand plans, and share their artistic aspirations and disappointments. And they become friends. But as they grow ever closer, Mrs. Jones begins to realize just how powerful Insel’s hold over her is.

Unpublished during Loy’s lifetime, Insel—which is loosely based on her friendship with the painter Richard Oelze—is a supremely surrealist, deliberately excessive creation: baroque in style, yet full of deft comedy and sympathy. Now, with an alternate ending only recently unearthed in the Loy archives, Insel is finally back in print, and Loy’s extraordinary achievement can be appreciated by a new generation of readers.

With an introduction by Sarah Hayden.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Novels, Literary Fiction, Art, Female Authors, Poetry

224 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1991

About the author

Loy was born Mina Gertrude Lowy in London, England. On leaving school, she studied painting, first in Munich for two years and then in London, where one of her teachers was Augustus John. She moved to Paris, France with Stephen Haweis who studied with her at the Académie Colarossi. The couple married in 1903. She first used the name Loy in 1904, when she exhibited six watercolor paintings at the Salon d'Automne in Paris.

Loy soon became a regular in the artistic community at Gertrude Stein's salon, where she met many of the leading avant garde artists and writers of the day. She and Stein were to remain lifelong friends.

In 1907, Loy and Haweis moved to Florence, Italy where they lived more or less separate lives, becoming estranged. Loy mixed with the expatriate community and the Futurists, having a sexual relationship with their leader Filippo Marinetti. At this time, she began what would be later known as "Songs to Joannes" [1]", a tour de force of modernist, avant-garde love poetry about Giovanni Papini, another Futurist with whom Loy had an unsuccessful relationship in Florence. She also started to publish her poems in New York magazines, such as Camera Work, Trend, and Rogue. She was a key figure in the group that formed around Others magazine, which also included Man Ray, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. She also became a Christian Scientist during this time.

Reviews

[Garima · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was the evening outside the Lutetia I experienced its effects. A sort of doubling of space where different selves lived different ways in different dimensions at once. Sitting on the sidewalk—floating in an Atlantic Ocean full of skyscrapers and ethereal cars. That was not particularly important— the wonder was the sense of timeless peace—of perfect happiness—

Quotes would suffice to explicate the hypnotic charm of this book but I need to pacify the countless thoughts wandering restlessly in my head. Mina Loy- that’s her on the book cover, invokes the image of a woman sitting against a wall with words, colorful words scattered all around her. Whether she would gather them in a notebook or splash them on an empty canvas to give some form to her whims is an act of that untranslatable artistic defiance that one can witness but can’t categorize under some conventional genre. If you’re willing to see, then she is ready to mesmerize.

It is the reverse of enlightenment to see oneself ‘in reality’. Of the image & likeness that forms our inexpressible Being—in the metamorphosis of passing through other brains—all that appears to our companions is a chimney sweep.

But she is better than others- takes in beauty and the wretched with equal fervor, berates the pity and peers directly into the human soul which consists of gazillions of contradictions but never cease to fascinate the ever searching mind. Having a nameless relationship with her surrealist friend, Insel*, Loy carefully bind together the fragments of their reckless meetings that reveal the variegated dimensions of life and the living. Her peculiar description about Insel gives a sense of continuity to an existence that can end anytime soon but hold on to something...surreal.

Life without world, how starkly lovely, stripped of despair. The soul, inhabiting the body of an ethic, ascended to the sapphire in the attic. Here was no need for salvage.

Loy’s poetic sensibilities works well with the obscure and enkindle the present with nostalgia of incomplete memories. It gently prod us to look past the extravagance of some of her sentences and focus our gaze on the fleeting truth which is already prepared to travel the oceans of a different, more cordial universe.

Because it was only a brain that had been spilled, the blank of orientation faded—the thousand directions withdrew, leaving us at a destination.

Nothingness.

*Insel’s character was inspired from Surrealist Painter, Richard Oelze.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insel is a book where words come first, where words stand on the page like little helmeted guards of the inner realm, and so the reader reads and paces the perimeter, enjoying the work of reading, of reading first one word and then the next and the next and so on, until the little helmeted guards themselves turn aside to chat amongst themselves, or pause for a cigarette, or piss in the brambles, and the reader slips through into the expansive realm of sense and sensation, free to wander in what feels like High Modernist Victoriana where rigorous sense impregnates vaporousness to eventually birth a hyper-logical Green Man of magic and pragmatism.

The writing itself is a delicious tangle of obdurate words, with beetling Latinisms looming over vapor and moss, while potent ideas (expressed with granitic logic, though often undermined by neologisms and eccentricity) mingle with dreamland’s deepest intuitions.

Insel is Loy’s response to Breton’s Nadja, and, for what it’s worth, bests it in every respect.

The meeting. The enchantment. The descent into the other’s realm unconsciously guided by that very other. The lessons learned. The return.

Both are quasi-fictional accounts of actual people and experiences, with Loy’s Insel being the “marginal surrealist” Richard Oelze, whose paintings, like his very being, are drifty chaos and dream just barely congealed into something apprehensible (if not completely comprehensible).



Insel/Oelze is pale and destitute, autistic, but nonetheless charming in a death’s-head-type way, conveying a natural magic and atmosphere of unconscious occultism. Loy is fascinated and plunges into the moss and fog of his personality, and as she is predisposed to a fascination with incipience, to that blurry point where things first come into being, Insel/Oelze acts much as an opiate and she’s hooked.

For most of the book she wanders in his realm, following him, helping him, being maddened by him, etc., in a kind of sleep or dream or swamp trek, until her natural defenses kick in, and the inherent logic of her mind, and her attraction to minute particulars as illuminated by sunlight, and she is freed from his spell, realizing that unlike as in Insel/Oelze’s vision (where all is in an arrested state of semi-stagnant fluctuation) things, even we as people, can ripen and come to fruition, can come to mean something.

And so Loy walks away. No doubt enriched by Insel/Oelze, but moving on.

The book left me with the distinct impression that it’s “message” was something very important to Loy in her solitude and reclusion (it was not published until after her death), and that it “fed” her in some fundamental and important way. And so by extension can do the same for the reader with whom it resonates.

* * *

Side Notes:

The 5 stars are no doubt my 5 stars as I'm in love with Loy, and though I first read this years ago it took a second reading for me to realize I could read it forever.

The cover design sucks, primarily for the fact that it bears no relation to the book's content or general atmosphere.

The font also sucks, in its inherent self, and because it rendered italics, which were used generously and appropriately throughout the book, virtually indistinguishable from the non-italicized text.

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I.
I should preface this section by saying that I am a huge admirer of Mina Loy's poetry; in fact, I think she is one of the finest modernist female poets, deservedly in the company of figures like Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein. The Last Lunar Baedeker may well be the best collection of modernist poetry ever, surpassing even William Carlos Williams's Spring and All or Eliot's The Waste Land. (I don't include Eliot's Four Quartets given its publication date is after the Second World War, and thus after the modernist period proper.)

Who else can write such terse verses like these, packed with metaphysical inquiries, ruminations on gender, philosophy, truth, and subjectivity?

The impartiality of the absolute
Routs     the polemic
Or which of us
Would not
Receiving the holy-ghost
Catch it     and caging
Lose it

(from Human Cylinders)

All of the female modernist writers I mentioned above—Barnes, H.D., and Stein—were also equally proficient and talented in prose, especially narrative prose. Barnes's Nightwood might in all reality be the best example of the modernist novel in English; H.D.'s HERmione (link to my Goodreads review) is one of the finest examples of the female Künstlerroman, not to mention a fascinating roman-à-clef that shows the egotistical influence Ezra Pound had on her life and her work; and, of course, Stein's Three Women and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and many other pieces that mingle poetics with prose, from prose poems to libretti, from novels to antinovels.

Insel is Loy's only novel, and it was never published during her lifetime. Unlike the compact, concise, and dagger-sharp precision found in all her verse, Insel lacks these qualities which make Loy's presence among the modernists, surrealists, Dadaists, cubists, and other bohemian art groups in the interwar period such a crucial presence. And Loy is indeed seminal to this period, both as a poet and as a curatorial presence to artistic figures as pivotal as Giacometti, Dalí, Magritte, Man Ray, and many others.

While there are moments of interesting scenes in cafés and clubs that bring to life the artistic world in Europe—and here, we are in an unnamed city in Germany—as well as tragicomical portraits of the surrealist painter Insel himself, Loy's prose meanders and is never sure of itself. At times, Loy is intent on relaying a tête-à-tête between the painter and the narrator, one Mrs. Jones, herself an artist (although very much ashamed of her output alongside more successful figures like Insel); at other times, Loy launches in philosophical comments about the meaning of art or the nature of place insofar as it informs subjectivity; still, in other sections, the growing camaraderie between Insel and Mrs. Jones results in an intriguing character sketch of what it might have been like to be a starving artist during this specific period in history.

But these sections have no flow to them—and, if you look at my favorite book shelf here, you'll see I actually prefer books without structure—and this is to Insel's detriment. Oddly enough, too, there are only a few passages where Loy's prose borders on poetic rumination: so this doesn't feel like "a poet's novel" (much as I hate to use that hackneyed phrase), but rather a poet's attempt to write narrative prose. And there are moments that succeed in doing just this, but far more that fail to cause Insel to be a complete fiction, standing on its own two feet. Rather, its importance to us now is as a social and historical document, which is something I consider in some depth below.


II.
Now, I should preface this section by saying how much I admire presses like Melville House who have just published Loy's Insel as part of their Neversink series. Without presses like Melville House, Dalkey Archive, New Directions, Archipelago, and NYRB, to name but a few, many books would never see the light of day, languishing under layers of dust in an archive somewhere with no readership to savor the succor many of these works afford. So Melville House should indeed be commended for publishing Insel, along with the "Visitation" fragment—which has never before seen the light of day—added in their volume as an appendix.

With that said, because as I stated above that Insel is a social and historical document—and that its import lies there, rather than its flawed attempt as a fictional experiment—I can't help but feel that the Melville House edition of Insel is one that falls flat of the requirements such a document necessitates. Sarah Hayden even addresses this in her introduction:

Due to the exigencies of space and formatting conventions established by the Neversink series, it was not possible to include by extended notes and critical apparatus.

Although Harding is speaking solely about her notes to the "Visitation" fragment, one can well imagine that her notes to Insel itself have also been excised due to these monolithic "exigencies." A social and historical document requires annotations throughout, not just an introductory or prefatory section, in order for readers to continually situate the text within its specific historical, social, and aesthetic contexts. For example, while many of the non-English terms—mostly German—are indeed translated at the end in yet another appendix, most of these annotations are Loy's own. Since Insel does not function solely in terms of fiction, as I have said repeatedly, it requires a contextualization and grounding for which Melville House's "exigencies" do not allow—and, sadly, the dearth of such materials can cause the text to be further isolated from a contemporary reader's experience of the bohemian art world it dramatizes.

I know that many readers have issues with academic presses, largely due to the costs of their products; however, I think that the only proper way to do Insel justice is to have the excised notes (and whatever other materials Hayden possessed and which were not placed on Melville House's website, which they have done in the case of Hayden's as far as "Visitation" goes). It is only with recourse to them that the world in Insel can come to life. Would an academic press have done a better job with the text? While I can't answer that question, I can almost assuredly say that they probably would have.

When reading fiction, minimal notes are always best so as to not detract from readers' experiences of the text. (I recall, for instance, a friend's experience reading several of Woolf's novels in the Harcourt editions, failing to realize there were notes toward the back as Harcourt chose not to "blemish" the main text with any indication—superscript, asterisk, or otherwise—that there were annotations.) But Insel is not fiction to be enjoyed: its whole raison d'être should and must be as a social and historical document: one requiring the laborious and sometimes cumbersome footnotes and annotations of academic work. Only then can this text be properly placed within its context; as it stands now, in this edition, the context is lost, thus making Loy's only flawed (failed?) attempt at fiction all the more glaringly futile when taken solely on its own terms.

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mina Loy’s elusive novel is a composite of experiences and ideas taken from her life: her involvement with the surrealist movement; her thoughts about art and writing; her unusual blend of mystical and religious beliefs; all intermingled with aspects of surrealist philosophies and techniques. These techniques are frequently visible in Loy’s chosen style, alongside a distinctly modernist approach. Insel is by turns a form of self-exploration; a critique of the male-dominated, surrealist art world; and even satire, as Loy freely criss-crosses various genre boundaries.

Loy’s story features Mrs Jones, loosely based on Loy, and Insel a version of German painter Richard Oelze. Loy and Oelze met in Paris in 1933 when she was working as a buyer for a gallery and he arrived in flight from Nazi Germany. Insel has no real plot, it charts the developing “friendship” between Mrs Jones and Insel, over various meetings, mostly set among Paris’s bohemian cafes. The semi-autobiographical dimension’s reinforced by the real-life figures from Loy’s circle who make cameo appearances, Man Ray joins them at their table, there are thinly-disguised versions of artists like Andre Breton and direct references to others like Joseph Cornell. All either former associates or friends of Loy.

Insel’s impoverished, emaciated, a near-vagrant whose lack of French makes it almost impossible for him to communicate. For many years he’s survived by manipulating women’s goodwill. For Mrs Jones he’s curiously appealing, emanating strahlen (rays) that have a profound, hypnotic impact on her consciousness. Mrs Jones decides to work with him on his autobiography, so he can sell it to finance his new life. But Insel’s a trickster-like figure, when the project’s almost finished, he give Mrs Jones a copy of Kafka’s The Trial, and she finds his tales were taken directly from it – Kafka crops up more than once here, including his story “A Hunger Artist.”

Other texts are key to Loy’s vision, the bond between middle-aged Mrs Jones and the younger Insel echoes, and subverts the one central to Andre Breton’s Nadja between a male artist/mentor and the unstable young girl of the title. Breton’s Nadja’s seen as embodying the irrational feminine, muse or inspiration. Although he’s an outsider in Paris’s artistic community, Insel takes on elements of Nadja’s role but he’s more reminiscent of the misogynist attitudes Loy encountered on the fringes of Breton’s world – Insel’s also discovered making money by pimping out black prostitutes, recalling the exploitation of black art during the ‘negritude’ phase of the 1920s. Insel’s illogical, self-obsessed but insecure, his appearance typifies the mythic (male) starving artist. But he's also traumatised by serving in WW1, perversely loyal, and has the ability to heal through an inexplicable psychic link.

Mrs Jones’s equally complicated. An artist and writer, she’s more grounded in reality than Insel; her white hair’s a symbol she’s no longer eligible for the status of acolyte or lover allotted to so many of the women linked to surrealism. Yet Mrs Jones’s ties to Insel both reinforce and undermine her independence. And, on some level, the narrative appears to be a vehicle for Loy’s questioning of her own position as a woman artist/writer, her issues about patriarchy, her feelings about her past, as well as a means of working through complex internal conflicts.

Insel can be dense at times, it’s highly referential, sometimes a little arcane. It's a book that probably needs to be read more than once. Some of the references to race made me uncomfortable. Loy’s use of language can be unsettling too: pithy, witty sentences mix with long, Latinate constructions that need careful attention. But it’s also a stimulating, entertaining perspective on art and gender as well as a fascinating account of an influential period of art history. Although a fully-annotated edition would definitely help readers unfamiliar with Loy or with the ideas and histories she’s representing.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

How did this ever take so many years to see publication? But we're lucky it did. Extreme eloquence, vision, and poetic-expressive precision of language makes what is essentially a character study of a minor forgotten artist, instead, something sublime and widely insightful. Really, it's magic. The passage about the metaphysical and psychokinetic significances of "closing a door", against its terminally ordinary appearance, is one incredible passage, but leafing through again, its pretty clear that they're all like that. This has been described as a female angle on Nadja, but stylistically it's much closer to Aragon.

So did any other Mina Loy prose ever get into publication? Cause I need it, NOW.

[Quill&Queer]

that one friend who's obsessed with an ugly bald man

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mina Loy, a poet, and very much a major figure in European/American arts during the DADA/Surrealist era, wrote one novel regarding the relationship between a female and a male painter, who is a pain-in-the-ass. The book in parts is very funny, especially with Loy's character putting down the painter as sort of a drama queen. It is also very much a book of its time and place - Paris in the early 1930s, when Andre Breton ruled the landscape. This book is very much a poet's narrative. The language is deep and rich which jumps around narrative wise, yet, the strong leading characters keeps one turning the pages. A fascinating document but essentially it works on a fictional level. Most would read this as an insider's look into the world of Surrealists - but in the end of the read/day, it's really a relationship novel between these two characters. A wonderful writer.

[Sketchbook · Rating 4 out of 5]

An other-worldly book by a memorable Surrealist.
See : the Eddie Waktins review. Mina Loy was unto
herself--.

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt primed to like this book - especially after reading the informative introduction by Sarah Hayden, which provided excellent background and context for the author and this text. It made me interested in reading more about Mina Loy - about her life and art and the people she interacted with - she seems fascinating. Sadly, I only got about a third of the way through Insel, before I had to give up. Though I didn't get very far, I still feel confident in saying the experience of reading Insel sucked. Basically a fictionalized memoir of a woman (and artist in her own right) who winds up playing the role of muse/caretaker to a cliche - the holy fool/trouble-causing artist. Its implied that Insel, despite being an irresponsible sponge, is somehow a loveable genius, but nothing he said came across as particularly profound or even interesting. It was never clear why she would be so taken with him.

Neither of the two main characters grabbed me, but the real deal killer for me was the prose, which reads like a bunch of pretentious jibber jabber. Insel is full of long convoluted sentences - and not the beautifully winding Pynchonian kind. This is a wordy mess, overflowing with descriptors - yet somehow not evocative - a pictureless abstraction, with no flow or resemblance to natural human speech or even a good poetic substitute. Insel reads like it was written by some weird French robot - or maybe a replicant. Maybe Mina Loy, while interesting in other ways, was just a pretentious and terrible writer. I leave you with a representative sample that kicks off chapter two: "On the grounds that he was starving to death, he would exact from us the minutiae of advice on his alimentary problems to subsequently toss all advice aside in his audacious irresponsibility." Now imagine a whole novel of this...

I will say the book is beautifully designed - a few people asked me what I was reading based on the striking cover image. Taking into account the great design and the informative introduction and afterword bookending the actual text, Insel is like a disappointing present that makes you appreciate a friend for the care and thought they took in wrapping it.

[Farhan Khalid · Rating 4 out of 5]

The unbearable emptiness of the house

Can you remember every moment, every least incident of your life?

You’d only have to write the way you paint. Minutely, meticulously

The artist who was to live in your apartment never came

Dressing up his insanity in another man’s madness

He visualized the mists of chaos curdling into shape

Within myself I found the artist

The world is populated with people anxious to know how I am getting on

But when I tell them — the world immediately depopulates!

I am starving to death except for a miracle

Her eyes are volcanic

My charmed curiosity wanted to cry

I’ve never really seen you

You always give me the impression that you are not there

Your way of being alive is a sequence of disappearances

You’re so afraid of actuality

I can materialize for you. Forever—on the corner of this street

If only we could sit here eternally

When he turned his face full on you, looked into your eyes with the great intensity of the hypnotist

The future and the past were with me at present

The whole of time

There was no more pursuing it, losing it, regretting it

We could have such a wonderful time together! He was not speaking. He was praying

I urged to cross the frontier of his individuality

I got in the way of that faintly electric current he emitted

In him everything seemed inverted

It was only when both his eyes were fixed upon me I entered his Edenic region of unreasoning bliss to sway among immaterial algae

Eternity spins round and round

I knew your language well enough to convey the subtlest shades of meaning

You know nothing of the etiquette of my underworld — its laws

He had rather discovered a slow time that must result in eternity

If this is madness

Madness is something very beautiful

I am eternally content

My happiness is infinite

All the desires of the earth are consummated within myself

You are the living confirmation of my favorite theories

The haunting thing about this Nothingness was that it knew we were still there

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do you dig on surrealist painting? This roman a clef is like a really really huge one, in words. Rich, dense, bizzare yet somehow comforting... like a Voges brownie. Insel is also problematic (there's some nasty racialized essentialism) but worthwhile, you know, if you're into ladylike facemelting and that sort of thing. Which I definitely am. Will be reading this one again.

[Rachel Kowal · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.4 stars

I could read this a second time and see myself equally likely to award it five stars as I would be to downgrade to two. It took nearly the entire book to get into Loy's dense rhythm. Sentences like: "I was being impelled to the pitiable serial choreography of Insel when in the closed cab, he had chased himself along the incalculable itinerary of his dissolution." Sentences that fold back in on themselves as if to point a finger and laugh at their own embellishments and fustian absurdity. Magniloquent, yes, but surprisingly self-aware and comical at times, too.

Can I have another few heads so I can read books in tandem, please? Great. Thanks, dear.

[Tony Gualtieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tremendous novel that should be better known. It's a character study of an artist on the fringe of the Paris avant-garde in the 1930s. The language and imagery are exquisite. As the editor mentions in her concluding essay, it serves as a kind of mirror to André Breton's Nadja.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those (semi-)rare occurrences where form and matter are congruent. A book about affect, connection, and obsession.

This was my first foray into Loy's work, so I can't say if it's archetypal of her style. It is a tough read until your brain meets a middle ground and syncs with hers, which becomes meta when you think about the project at hand. Satire is too heavy of a tag, in my opinion; it really weighs the book down like a burden. It undermines something that she's trying to get at, and can maybe only get at through her half sentences, run-ons, and fragments. Affect is larger than life, not attributed to the corporeal, but on the most basic level, it feels as though it needs to spring from somewhere--the body! (This is also the reason why I can't get behind the readings of "Visitation" as Insel being a daydream--what a cop out.) She collapses and distorts time and space to try to depict affect and the feelings of oneness. It's that feeling of trying to understand the other, especially when that other may be parts of you to the nth degree. It's being disgusted by what you find (often times it being a reflection), and flirting with what you could become. Insel is dangerous, and I think that may explain some of her attraction to him. I'm glad she put down into words this kind of relationship, which is so often just summed up as a crush. There is nothing "crush"-like about it, but there is something like love or care?

The book was never published during Loy's lifetime, and I'm skeptical that she ever had the intention to publish it. There is a guardedness. This feeling like she needs to protect what he's disclosed to her. (I wish I could find the quote where she specifically withholds certain information about their meetings from her friend.) There is care, but it makes you think about connection. Studying someone intensely and obsessively like an object. Finding less than what you thought to be there or being able to name/classify and, subsequently, dismiss what they are. Not very Levinasian, but maybe more true to reality. That feeling of melding and kind of understanding what someone is about, and in turn, dropping them when you do. Loy even talks about how her friend says she walks into men's minds, sits in an armchair, writes down everything she sees, and leaves.

I feel kindred with Loy, for better or worse, and that's what made me pick up the book to begin with. Although some of the culpability lies with Loy, there is something to be said about Insel. His feelings and reactions to the withdrawal of her obsession. Did he truly want her companionship, or did he want a worshipper?

In sum, the mundane, amplified and distorted, to get at the otherworldly feeling when you truly know someone. Loy's style is perfect; written like metaphors, it may be the best way at getting at that which can just barely be put into words. Sometimes, writing with extreme clarity, populating the pages with beautiful internal rhymes, and others times, it makes reader think maybe it's devolved too far into nothingness.

[Kobe]

with prose that is as charming as it is pretentious (much like its titular character), there were certainly some interesting moments in this book, but, unlike the narrator's infatuation with insel, it failed to entirely draw me in. 3 stars,

[Misha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book but I can't exactly determine why. It is difficult and slow to read. The language is byzantine and bizarre. You often have to read the same tangled poetic sentence several times to determine what it means. Nothing much happens in the book. Somehow though it is effecting and gorgeous and I can't recommend it highly enough. Her portrait of Insel, the craven ectoplasmic surrealist painting/painter is one for the ages.

[Pınar Bahar]

"You always give me the impression that you are not there. Sometimes you have
no inside; sometimes no outside, and never enough of anything to entirely
materialize. Like a quicksand, when one looks at you whatever one gets a glimpse
of you immediately rush up from your own depths to snatch. Your way of being
alive is a sequence of disappearances. You’re so afraid of actuality." (Insel 36)

[Rhonda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything one could want from a Modernist novel! Surrealism, fragmented narrative, stream of consciousness psychical writing, satire, poetic - topped off with a victorious feminist message! Excellent!

[Tilly Shales · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is undoubtedly technically and poetically brilliant however, as a novel, I think it falls short of being readable enough. I think it deserved to have been published as a historical and semi-biographical source and a valuable text of (rare female) modernism. But I’ll only give it 3 stars because I think it lacked certain qualities that make prose novels excellent.

[Sofia Cimballa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely surrealist. Very cool. Short chapters.

[Gee · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is like eating a caramel the size of a bar of soap in EVERY way.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A truly bananas crazy-making book. Though not long, it took me ages to get through because I kept stopping to look up words and parse the phrasing.

More than any book in recent memory (more than Ulysses! more than Nightwood!), this novel forced me to experience English as a foreign language. I felt like I was learning to read as I worked my way through, line by line.

Loy’s body politics are fascinating and I don’t even know how to begin to categorize them. Her descriptions are fractal and divisive and goopy.

So yeah, weird book.

[Tieu uyen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Viết về Paris những năm 30 của thế kỉ trước, nhiều người viết hay, nhiều người viết chân thật, nhiều người viết cảm xúc, nhưng viết nhạt và lơ mơ lờ mờ cũng ko thiếu hê hê. Nói chung là nhà văn viết thơ thế nào, thì nhà thơ viết văn thế í. Em Mina cũng không ngoại lệ, ngoài chuyện ẻm đa zi năng ra, viết nhiều phê bình cũng ko đến nỗi, nhưng viết văn thì cũng chỉ thường thường bậc trung.

[Ashwoodmeadow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ohmygoshthiswassoconvolutedyetbeautiful.

Think of this as a whole book of poetry. Her metaphors are, as my professor put, “A ruby to be held up to the light for careful inspection.”

Was there love between Insel and Mrs. Jones? Who liberated who? Why was Insel so annoying sometimes and so breathtakingly romantic other times?

Peruse it in sips!

[Billy Dagger]

"Once at dark in the Maine woods, I had stumbled on a rotten log. The scabs of foetid bark flew off revealing a solid cellulose jewel. It glowed in the tremendous tepidity of phosphorescence from a store of moonlight similar to condensed sun in living vegetables." 97

fun stuff

[Amira Hanafi · Rating 5 out of 5]

embroidering in the finest, richest word-threads, mina loy takes us into another, surreal dimension. this is absolutely my new favorite.

[Charles Beauregard]

It reminds one a lot of Nightwood by Djuna Barnes. Baroque language.

It follows a man named Insel, the ethereal bum, and his interesting acts. Its funny.

[Joe Skilton · Rating 1 out of 5]

“ …the mists of chaos curdling into shape…

***

"Immer - Immer spazieren—eternally taking a walk," he insisted, once more aware of my presence; his voice dwindled to a pathos so unearthly it could only converse with the unconscious. His eyes, for dusk had fallen, were phosphorescent as approaching fireflies.

***

Rigid as bygone queens in her orthopedic corset, she accepted the offering of every conceivable kind of toy duck from her wondering courtiers, with a lunar giggle that never precisely applied to anything. Her passion, her concretion of sublimity, took the form of a duck. "God is playing hide-and-seek," she would announce, "so the Virgin Mary has married a duck and they live in the top story of the Riviera." And once when I found her watching some live water fowl by a pond in a farmyard— "Why do you love the duck?" I asked her. "Il dort dans son dos" she perfectly replied. “

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

You never know with 'great rediscovered surrealist novel' whether you're going to get randomised pointlessness like The Magnetic Fields or some of the recent republications of certain English surrealist writer-painters, or, something great like Paris Peasant or Nadja; this is closer to the latter. Beautifully written (in English rather than translated, which always helps), and with some extraordinary images and constructions, but the flights of fancy yoked to its narrator's sympathetic if often mocking friendship with an exiled German painter. A sad and often funny character study and often a lot more than that, a book about the inability of two people to properly understand and communicate with each other.

[Rita · Rating 5 out of 5]

4,5

«I’m so ugly naked,» he told me most unexpectedly, in a tone of intense and anxious confidence. «I can’t go to the public baths because I daren’t walk down to the water.»
«Your face is naked and you walk about with it.»
«Yes,» he assented miserably, «and it frightens the women. I used to be so beautiful. Is it imaginable?» he asked, peering expectantly into my face.
«I’m tired of your tirade as to how hideous you are.»
«All women are terrified of me,» he continued automatically.
«I said tired–not terrified, and I’ll tell you why. I’ve never really seen you. You always give me the impression that you are not there. Sometimes you have no inside; sometimes no outside, and never enough of anything to entirely materialize. Like a quicksand, when one looks at you whatever one gets a glimpse of you immediately rush up from your own depths to snatch. Your way of being alive is a sequence of disappearances. You’re so afraid of actuality.»
«I can materialize for you,», he said raptly, «forever–on the corner of this street.» (p. 36)

«I am to die,» he rejoiced. «And will you weep one little tear for me?» he asked flirtatiously. «Yum, yum,» I jibed, intent on the beauty of the silver rivers he had loosened in the veins of the ugly marble table top. «Does ums want to be pitied? – You’ve struck a hunk of granite.»
«You won’t weep?» he implored from a gust of sad laughter.
«Not a drop.»
Insel tried again. «Sterben,» he sighed in the voice of a weary archangel, an incommemorable voice burying the endlessness of death in two syllables. I was disturbed–if he should peter out on that annihilating refrain I would never know what was so weirdly, so wonderfully the matter with this exquisite scarecrow.
«Insel,» I shook him gently, «you’re much more likely to make people weep by remaining alive.»(p. 54)

These two people are enjoying each other’s company immensly.

Very surrealist in the way it is written, the dialogues, the juxtapositions and images. If you have read «Nadja» by Breton, that novel will probably cross your mind when reading Insel, if only for the fact that both novels have a name as a title – and the way the name is the focal point of the novel. I read «Nadja» decades ago, so I cannot really say anything about it, since all I remember is that I felt sorry for Nadja. In «Insel», I also feel a bit sorry for Insel, but even though Insel is based on the German painter Oelze, he is very much a fictional character. I hope that Oelze didn't look like a skeleton, had rotten stumps for teeth, was afflicted with elevation and so on. Nadja was(?) written as a manic pixie dream girl (self-made, or self-destructive, to make Breton and the surrealists interested?), Insel is kind of like a manic pixie dream man, created by Loy. Or should I say Mrs. Jones, the narrator of the book?

Mrs. Jones falls heavily, heavily under the spell of Insel, oops I almost wrote Oelze, she is completely infatuated with him (at least that's my impression). And she sees him as supremely surreal, and she wants to see him that way, it is what makes him interesting. SHE sees him that way, the way one might do in the beginning when in love, creating one’s own myth about the person and imposing it upon them, even though the myth is false and hard to measure up to by the myhologized being (somewhere in the book Insel protests that «Nobody ever sees in me what you see in me–»).

«You might as well come up and see Ussif with me,» I suggested.
«No,» said Insel, «none of the surrealists will have anything to do with me. They know only too well, if they did, I should try to borrow money».

«I should have thought you’d be worth a little money to a surrealist. He might learn what superreality is about– you are organically surreal.»

«I don’t do it on purpose,» said Insel dejected. (p. 108)

Is Insel mad, is he addicted to morphine …or is he simply surreal with all his being? Mrs. Jones clings to the latter with all her might. I also get the feeling she is busy defending herself throughout the book against Insel’s magnetic pull on her, using all the defence mechanisms she has, culminating towards the end of the book.

«I could not make out why this fantastically beautiful creature should have both hands round my throat, when Insel, shrunken to a nerve, his eyes fixed as blinded granite, sat at that distance with his fists so tightly clenched. Fingers of automatic pressure rapped their tonnage of abstract force on my jugular – the blood on my brain surged in a noisy confusion – «You are going to give in–obsessed by my beauty–having no hope–endlessly resigned–» All the air wheezed in my exploding ears as a last breath, «–suffering–suffering–suffering–choked by a robot!» This was not all that suffocated me – myriads upon myriads of distraught women were being strangled in my esophagus.»

«You–are–going–to–give–in.» «To whom?» I wondered – my eyes closing. «To Insel? Or this incredibly lovely monster made of dead flesh?» «Thou art fair my beloved, thou–,» rose from a subconscious abyss.» (p. 134)

Definitely not a book for everyone, I can see how its density and writing style could be a turn-off. I, however, loved it and intend to write a small and incomprehensible essay about it in my boudoir towards evening, thinking wistfully about my foolish, albeit lovely youth, wishing I had been more like Mina Loy as a character when I was in my prime.

"He hung over die Irma like a tall insect and outside the window in the rotten rose of an asphyxiated sunset the skeleton phallus of the Eiffel Tower reared in the distance as slim as himself" (p. 110)