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The Baudelaire Fractal
Raised from babydom into doubt, I’m as feminine as Rousseau. I, Hazel Brown, eldest daughter of a disappearing class, penniless neophyte stunned by the glamour of literature, tradeless, clueless, yet with considerable moral stamina and luck, left my family at seventeen to seek a way to live. It was the month of June in 1979. I was looking for Beauty: I didn’t exactly care about art, I simply wanted not to be bored and to experience grace. So I thought I would write.
One morning, Hazel Brown wakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she’s written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris. This is the legend of a she-dandy’s life.
Woven into the reminiscences of Hazel’s early life are episodes from Baudelaire’s youth, as well as reflections on the history of tailoring, the passion of reading and 19th century painting. Lisa Robertson’s debut novel is an exploration of life lived in pursuit of beauty, and a celebration of the mind of a girl.
One morning, Hazel Brown wakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she’s written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris. This is the legend of a she-dandy’s life.
Woven into the reminiscences of Hazel’s early life are episodes from Baudelaire’s youth, as well as reflections on the history of tailoring, the passion of reading and 19th century painting. Lisa Robertson’s debut novel is an exploration of life lived in pursuit of beauty, and a celebration of the mind of a girl.
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 21, 2020
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October 26, 2021
Why I read.
December 6, 2023
The best reviewer of this work is by Charles Baudelaire, the poet mentioned in its title. In the preface to his Paris Spleen or “Petits Poèmes en prose” addressed to Arsene Houssaye he says the following:
“I send you a little work of which no one can say, without doing it an injustice, that it has neither head nor tail, since, on the contrary, everything in it is both head and tail, alternately and reciprocally. …Chop it into numerous pieces and you will see that each one can get along alone.”
He has written it in the middle of the 19th century. But it perfectly sums up my impression about “The Baudelaire Fractal” written somewhere in the second decade of the 21st. It is not a coincidence of course as this book is in constant conversation with Baudelaire’s work. Still, it is impressively apt.
“The Baudelaire Fractal” is a sort of Künstlerroman consisting of a number of chapters - mini-essays. They, in my view, can be read in any order though they are loosely connected.
The double coding described in “Intertextual irony and level of reading” by Umberto Eco once again comes to mind. It talks that there is often more than one layer to appreciate in a work or art depending the needs or experience of the reader. This work operates at least on two levels:
First level: A drifter in Paris
A young woman is alone in Paris learning how to write, walking the streets, meeting up young men for sex, drifting from one place to another. Later, in the middle of her life she describes her experiences in writing this book. Her personal memories are intervened with cultural and biographical fragments about the 19th century Paris, Baudelaire and his circle especially. As a result, we are presented with her unique dynamic view:
“Garments, rooms, paintings, desire: in each of these perceptual frames, there is the feeling of the movement of time as an inner experience made available to sensing and wilderness of interpretation by way of material borders or limits.”
Interestingly, the protagonist includes fashion as the one of her perceptual frames. I am used to discussions of historical personalities, books and paintings in this type of work. But the fashion was quite a new way for me to look at the world: “Fashion had initiated me into the untimeliness within the timely; after a period of forgetting, garments describe garments, unfurling secretive negation wishing apparent semblance.”
Apart from Jean Rhys, we usually read about male drifters. Therefore to have a young female protagonist is wonderfully refreshing. Her experiments with desire, living in someone else rooms, working for random jobs for living seem to be well-trodden subjects. But she managed to reveal a lot of new, distinctive angles of her experience:
“Very line of memory twists back on itself, branches off, contracts and expands and reproduces like a form of life.”
Her excursions into history and theory of culture were smart and poignant. For example, she devoted a substantial space to Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s lover of 20 years. Duval was a mixed race actress, a courtesan and generally a popular figure of that time and circle. However, Courbet has washed her out from his painting “The Artist Studio”. It is a mystery why he has done it. Some say on Baudelaire’s request. Some say the latter has nothing to do with that. Nevertheless, the painting was first exhibited without her. But nowadays her silhouette is apparently visible on the canvas in the Musée d’Orsay.
The way how she combined all these threads into an organism, the prose and philosophic depth is really what made this book to stand out for me.
Second level: Transformation
As the second possible layer, the author uses her protagonist’s relationship with Baudelaire’s oeuvre to explore the concept of authorship. What is that? Can it belong to one individual? What is that a writer/poet/artist actually does?
“Latin root of the word author was actor - to augment. … The augmenter is the one who inserts extra folds into the woven substance of language. Extra to what? Certainly extra to the compact of the sign as a dual bearer of meaning. This will always leave something out of the description of the language dark work. The augmenter includes the displaced parts, because they are pleasurable, because they are moody, lazy, slutty, mannered, frivolous, unprincipled, because they are monstrous, because they are necessary, because they are angry, because history needs them without knowing it yet, because without them, the world gets grindingly thinner and more cruel, becomes a parody of the sign.”
Her heroine is waking up one day to feel that he possess all the works of the poet:
“What happened was this: I smashed up against a violent and completely formed recognition that entered through my sleepy hands. The poems were my poems. The words as I read them were words I know deeply because they were my own, the way my skin was physiologically my own. I’d muttered these words as I walked. I crossed them out after several years to replace them with other words and then changed them back. I was completely inside the poem I was reading, and also within its gradual, discontinuous making, which was both skin and breath, and too, sheer wit..”
Even after Borges’s famous story of Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, this confession still might come across as a bit gimmicky. But I believe it is made for good reason. I believe a talented, creative person can literally feel something like that while facing with a work of art. Let’s call it intangible inheritance for the absence of better word.
I was reminded of a similar sentiment sublimely expressed by Luise Bennett in Checkout 19:
“Sometimes all it takes is just one sentence. Just one sentence, there you are, part of something that has been part of you since the beginning, whenever that might rightly be. The source, yes, you can feel in thrumming and surging, and it’s such a relief, to feel you are made of much more that just yourself, that you are only a rind really, a rind you should take care of yet mustn’t get too attached to, that you mustn’t be afraid to let melt away now and then.”
After reading this passage, I do not think anyone would be able to doubt that the feeling is real.
To emphasise this transformational experience of her narrator, the author has named each chapter of this book after a poem in prose from Paris Spleen. I’ve read each chapter alongside with its namesake from Baudelaire and I did not find any superficial textual echoes. It was gentler than this. But this experience of reading the two works together has certainly adds to the appreciation of both of them - this subtle sense of accretion of the newer one on the older.
The author calls the book a fictional novel. If anything it is the one of those genre-defying books which are quite numerous nowadays. However, not many are memorable for the brilliant prose, interesting concept and original point of view. This one does hit the right buttons for me. It would go into my personal canon of such works together with Checkout 19 and Optic Nerve. I tried to avoid the dreaded word “autofiction” in describing this book and I would let Baudelaire again help me with this:
“You might ask me: “Are you sure that this story is the real one?” What does it matter what reality dwells outside of me, if the story helps me live, helps me feel that I am and what I am?”
“I send you a little work of which no one can say, without doing it an injustice, that it has neither head nor tail, since, on the contrary, everything in it is both head and tail, alternately and reciprocally. …Chop it into numerous pieces and you will see that each one can get along alone.”
He has written it in the middle of the 19th century. But it perfectly sums up my impression about “The Baudelaire Fractal” written somewhere in the second decade of the 21st. It is not a coincidence of course as this book is in constant conversation with Baudelaire’s work. Still, it is impressively apt.
“The Baudelaire Fractal” is a sort of Künstlerroman consisting of a number of chapters - mini-essays. They, in my view, can be read in any order though they are loosely connected.
The double coding described in “Intertextual irony and level of reading” by Umberto Eco once again comes to mind. It talks that there is often more than one layer to appreciate in a work or art depending the needs or experience of the reader. This work operates at least on two levels:
First level: A drifter in Paris
A young woman is alone in Paris learning how to write, walking the streets, meeting up young men for sex, drifting from one place to another. Later, in the middle of her life she describes her experiences in writing this book. Her personal memories are intervened with cultural and biographical fragments about the 19th century Paris, Baudelaire and his circle especially. As a result, we are presented with her unique dynamic view:
“Garments, rooms, paintings, desire: in each of these perceptual frames, there is the feeling of the movement of time as an inner experience made available to sensing and wilderness of interpretation by way of material borders or limits.”
Interestingly, the protagonist includes fashion as the one of her perceptual frames. I am used to discussions of historical personalities, books and paintings in this type of work. But the fashion was quite a new way for me to look at the world: “Fashion had initiated me into the untimeliness within the timely; after a period of forgetting, garments describe garments, unfurling secretive negation wishing apparent semblance.”
Apart from Jean Rhys, we usually read about male drifters. Therefore to have a young female protagonist is wonderfully refreshing. Her experiments with desire, living in someone else rooms, working for random jobs for living seem to be well-trodden subjects. But she managed to reveal a lot of new, distinctive angles of her experience:
“Very line of memory twists back on itself, branches off, contracts and expands and reproduces like a form of life.”
Her excursions into history and theory of culture were smart and poignant. For example, she devoted a substantial space to Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s lover of 20 years. Duval was a mixed race actress, a courtesan and generally a popular figure of that time and circle. However, Courbet has washed her out from his painting “The Artist Studio”. It is a mystery why he has done it. Some say on Baudelaire’s request. Some say the latter has nothing to do with that. Nevertheless, the painting was first exhibited without her. But nowadays her silhouette is apparently visible on the canvas in the Musée d’Orsay.
The way how she combined all these threads into an organism, the prose and philosophic depth is really what made this book to stand out for me.
Second level: Transformation
As the second possible layer, the author uses her protagonist’s relationship with Baudelaire’s oeuvre to explore the concept of authorship. What is that? Can it belong to one individual? What is that a writer/poet/artist actually does?
“Latin root of the word author was actor - to augment. … The augmenter is the one who inserts extra folds into the woven substance of language. Extra to what? Certainly extra to the compact of the sign as a dual bearer of meaning. This will always leave something out of the description of the language dark work. The augmenter includes the displaced parts, because they are pleasurable, because they are moody, lazy, slutty, mannered, frivolous, unprincipled, because they are monstrous, because they are necessary, because they are angry, because history needs them without knowing it yet, because without them, the world gets grindingly thinner and more cruel, becomes a parody of the sign.”
Her heroine is waking up one day to feel that he possess all the works of the poet:
“What happened was this: I smashed up against a violent and completely formed recognition that entered through my sleepy hands. The poems were my poems. The words as I read them were words I know deeply because they were my own, the way my skin was physiologically my own. I’d muttered these words as I walked. I crossed them out after several years to replace them with other words and then changed them back. I was completely inside the poem I was reading, and also within its gradual, discontinuous making, which was both skin and breath, and too, sheer wit..”
Even after Borges’s famous story of Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, this confession still might come across as a bit gimmicky. But I believe it is made for good reason. I believe a talented, creative person can literally feel something like that while facing with a work of art. Let’s call it intangible inheritance for the absence of better word.
I was reminded of a similar sentiment sublimely expressed by Luise Bennett in Checkout 19:
“Sometimes all it takes is just one sentence. Just one sentence, there you are, part of something that has been part of you since the beginning, whenever that might rightly be. The source, yes, you can feel in thrumming and surging, and it’s such a relief, to feel you are made of much more that just yourself, that you are only a rind really, a rind you should take care of yet mustn’t get too attached to, that you mustn’t be afraid to let melt away now and then.”
After reading this passage, I do not think anyone would be able to doubt that the feeling is real.
To emphasise this transformational experience of her narrator, the author has named each chapter of this book after a poem in prose from Paris Spleen. I’ve read each chapter alongside with its namesake from Baudelaire and I did not find any superficial textual echoes. It was gentler than this. But this experience of reading the two works together has certainly adds to the appreciation of both of them - this subtle sense of accretion of the newer one on the older.
The author calls the book a fictional novel. If anything it is the one of those genre-defying books which are quite numerous nowadays. However, not many are memorable for the brilliant prose, interesting concept and original point of view. This one does hit the right buttons for me. It would go into my personal canon of such works together with Checkout 19 and Optic Nerve. I tried to avoid the dreaded word “autofiction” in describing this book and I would let Baudelaire again help me with this:
“You might ask me: “Are you sure that this story is the real one?” What does it matter what reality dwells outside of me, if the story helps me live, helps me feel that I am and what I am?”
May 31, 2021
There is a formal and tonal synesthesia inflecting Baudelaire’s spiralling poetic line. The poems trace a turbulence that continued outwards, fractal, from the complex curvature of compositional time — a table in a room by a river — towards future contacts, future refrains, in infinitely productive tangents of temporal plasticity. A verse becomes a poem in prose; a youthful tenderness intertwines with and partly traduces future political despair. This turbulence reinvents itself in any reader as she leans into the embracing poem.
Although admittedly taken out of context, the above is a fair sampling of the writing in The Baudelaire Fractal — a book that would have never registered on my radar if it hadn’t been shortlisted for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award — and while I found this a dense and challenging work of (presumed) autofiction, the details that author Lisa Robertson included were so far removed from my own knowledge base that I spent quite a bit of interesting time looking into such diverse topics as the life of Charles Baudelaire and his longtime mistress Jeanne Duval, the fashion design of Issey Miyake, the paintings of Émile Deroy; from a more or less simple premise, the details fractalize outwards, providing interwoven commentary on art, gender, freedom, and self-creation. I had no idea what this was about going in, feel like I have only a marginally better idea what it was about at this point, but I have no regrets about my strained efforts to parse what Robertson was getting at, and enjoyed the related research quite a bit. This seems like an outlier on the GG shortlist; it will be interesting to see how it fares.
Though I liked his philosophy of tailoring very much, I did not set out to compose the work of Baudelaire. In truth I’d barely read him.
The publisher’s blurb begins, One morning, the poet Hazel Brown wakes up in a strange hotel room to find that she's written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. And while that is sort of metaphorically true, the blurb seems to promise a kind of plot-rich metaphysical romp that simply never occurs. Rather, The Baudelaire Fractal is a memoirish rumination on literary theory by a middle-aged poet who looks back on her formative years, and recognising that her experiences living at the poverty line in a string of chilly Parisian garrets echoed the formative experiences of Baudelaire a century earlier, this Hazel Brown concludes that the same experiences will light the same fire, will forge the same art (complicated only by gender in this case). The mature Hazel fondly revisits the diaries of her younger self — the Vancouver girl who eschewed education for experience; who knew that freedom could only be found in Paris, experiencing desire and art and poverty, attempting to capture things exactly as they were in her writing — and while Hazel can see the great distance between her two selves, it seems to me that Robertson finds the greatest meaning in such distances: hotel rooms are not homes; knock-off fashion is not couture; the cool trail of a lover’s silver necklace is not the warmth of that lover’s kiss across the length of one’s body; and yet — it is in the space between the two (rather than in the things themselves) that meaning/art/life is found. Or maybe I was just trying way too hard to find a conventional novel in an unconventional project.
I just want to add a few more passages to give a sense of things. Hazel writes about having seen Émile Deroy’s La Mendiante Rousse in the Louvre, adds that Baudeliare wrote a poem about the same young woman (To a Red-Haired Beggar Girl) — as did several other poets in their circle — and explains that she hadn’t actually been a beggar but a professional chanteuse: Street singers had served important social and political functions in Paris, but after Napoleon III enlisted Georges-Eugène Haussmann to raze and rebuild the city, the banks would take over the streets, silencing such singers with registration and censorship laws. In this passage about the unnamed subject of the portrait and poems, Robertson initially had me totally intrigued:
To remember that we’re just clay, we’re pigment, as we’re being it, this is the great immodesty of art. I had a fundamental greediness for this immodesty. It radiated an attractive muteness, just beyond my cognitive limits. Materiality is too mild and limited a term for it. How to describe the sensation?
But from the next sentence, Robertson’s writing spirals everything out beyond my grasp:
Sometimes you shiver or shudder slightly, the instant before entering a room. Your approach has animated a spiritual obscurity. This bodily hesitation is a tradition of entering the negation of names, and it colours the way I perceive all transition. Your body can sometimes deter its own representation; this breach indicates an interiorized covenant or restraint. It’s called the feminine. It’s a historical condition. The movement of perception or description, which are so closely intertwined as to be indiscernible, is not between nominal categories or aesthetic concepts. The girl is not a concept. Her idea has no core or centre; it takes place on the sills, in the non-enunciation of her name. This feminine namelessness seeps outwards with undisciplined grandeur. The girl’s identity is not pointlike, so it can’t be erased. It’s a proliferating tissue of refusals. Unoriginal, it trails behind me, it darts before me, like my own shadow, or a torn garment. I say unoriginal because once she was named. The removal of her name is an historical choice, so ubiquitous that it seems natural. There is no nameless girl. There is no girl outside language. The girl is not an animal who goes aesthetically into the ground, as many of the philosophers would have it. The girl is an alarm. Her lust is always articulate. If her song goes unrecognized it’s because its frame’s been suppressed; her song is enunciation’s ruin. It is a discontinuous distribution, without institution. Always the tumult of her face is saying something to her world. Prodigal, undisciplined, with an aptitude for melancholy and autonomous fidelity: nameless girl with your torn skirt, there’s nothing left for you but to destroy art.
Quite a lot of The Baudelaire Fractal reads like that, and if it has you nodding your head along in pleasured comprehension, then I reckon you’d appreciate this read even more than I did. I will happily acknowledge that there were many passages like the following that stopped me dead with their beauty:
I would have liked my sentences to devour time. They’d be fat with it. In what sense is anger ornamental? When it permits a girl to pleasurably appear to herself. There was never a room that could hold my anger and so I went to the infinity of the phrase. Obviously it wasn’t simple like that. Anger was my complicated grace.
The sexuality of sentences: Reader, I weep in it.
Lisa Robertson is a celebrated poet and this is her first novel: she has no duty to stick to acknowledged forms in either poetry or prose, but this reader couldn’t quite follow her out to the ends of her recursive fractal geometries. But once again, I did enjoy being stretched until I snapped and the experience off the page (the poems, paintings, fashion, and history) enriched the whole. I’m going to round down to three stars simply because I fear rounding up to four will make me look like a poseur who wants to pretend I understood more of this than I did. I understand completely why so many readers have given this five stars.
April 13, 2022
Best book I've read so far this year. A remarkable, lyrical, poetic, intellectual first novel set in Paris, the declaration of a woman who really claims the first person. Who builds the world through her own sensibility. Who claims not to be Charles Baudelaire, but to have written his works. It was so beautiful, I could quote any part of it and it would be as brilliant and fascinating as any other part.
The young protagonist, Hazel Brown, thinks about time. She thinks about hotel rooms, and maps, and fashion, art and literature, the furnishings Poe favored, the erotic. She casts her net wide. There is no dialogue at all. "Prodigal, undisciplined, with an aptitute for melancholy, I left houses, cities, lovers, schools, hotels, and countries. I left with haste, or I left languidly. Also I was asked to leave. I left languages and jobs. Leaving made a velocity. I left garments, books, notebooks, and several good companions. Sometimes I left ideas."
I read it for a book group, and when I first held it, the book was so physically beautiful I didn't want to mark it up-- beautiful laid paper, the exquisite layout. Then I realized it was a Coach House Book, a fabulous small press in Toronto, with in house printing and superb taste and attention to the book as an object as well as an experience of mind.
This is a book that's completely about sensibility--the feminist, first person sensibility of a young woman (girl as the protagonist prefers):
"I'm writing this in 2016 in a rented cottage at the edge of fields in central France. My task to to re-enterby means of sentences, the course of my early apprenticeship. This desire to make a representative document began only with involuntary incident at the hotel, the authorship that arrived both gradually and all at once. For a long time I have been more or less content with arcane researches that lead me into lush but impersonal lyric. Now I feel I must account for this anachronistic event; I'll follow it back to unspoken things. I want to make a story about the total implausibility of girlhood. This morning I'm at the round table under the linden tree...
"I'm sitting beneath the linden tree holding at bay the skepticism of my calling, describing how all at once, in a hotel by a harbor, I was seized by a kinship; how every slowly in weaving between cities and rooms, I became what I am not. Time has a style the way bodies do. There are turns and figures of iteration and relationship. But also times and bodies overlap. This work must annotate those parts of experience that evade determination. Here my fidelity is for the antithetical nature of the feminine concept. I was a girl. I could not escape desire, but now I can turn to contemplate it, and so convert my own complicity into writing. In this landscape time is pliable; it's a place of nightingales and poorness and wild cherry trees. Spring comes, slow and sudden. I'll work with that. I'll make this account using my nerves and my sentiment.
"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 tub of my pronoun."
Such a book cannot be summarized. I wonder whether her assertion that she 'wrote' the books of Charles Baudelaire has to do with readership as a participatory activity--the way we do complete an authors work by reading it. That we do in fact author, in a way, as we recreate the creative act in our minds.
But the writing is so beautiful, so intelligent and propulsively interesting, I don't miss the conventional novelistic devices such as dialogue and realtime scenes. it's motival writing, and certain images recur and recur, Poe's crimson carpet (Poe had a theory of furniture, who knew?)
So many tiny ponderable ideas, page after page after page, like this:
"The elemental hospitality of the inferior hotel, felt in the. minimal, even ironical welcome, the absence of an exaggeration or luxury that would leave one in its debt, the muteness and reluctance of the clerk: this is the stupidity I crave.'
It's a book I will read again and again, it doesn't exhaust its riches on the first read. I would put it on a very special shelf with Heidi Sopinka's "Dictionary of Animal Languages," Lindsey Darger's "The Sorrow Proper," Leland de la Durantaye's "Hannah Versus the Wolves" and in a strange way, Cortazar's "Hopscotch." Novels of form and novels of idea, written with precision and lyricism and a mad imagination.
The fractal of the title, I believe, refers to motif and metaphor, that kind of artistic and conceptual repetition on various scales. It's hilariously listed on A*zn in "Fractal Mathematics."
The young protagonist, Hazel Brown, thinks about time. She thinks about hotel rooms, and maps, and fashion, art and literature, the furnishings Poe favored, the erotic. She casts her net wide. There is no dialogue at all. "Prodigal, undisciplined, with an aptitute for melancholy, I left houses, cities, lovers, schools, hotels, and countries. I left with haste, or I left languidly. Also I was asked to leave. I left languages and jobs. Leaving made a velocity. I left garments, books, notebooks, and several good companions. Sometimes I left ideas."
I read it for a book group, and when I first held it, the book was so physically beautiful I didn't want to mark it up-- beautiful laid paper, the exquisite layout. Then I realized it was a Coach House Book, a fabulous small press in Toronto, with in house printing and superb taste and attention to the book as an object as well as an experience of mind.
This is a book that's completely about sensibility--the feminist, first person sensibility of a young woman (girl as the protagonist prefers):
"I'm writing this in 2016 in a rented cottage at the edge of fields in central France. My task to to re-enterby means of sentences, the course of my early apprenticeship. This desire to make a representative document began only with involuntary incident at the hotel, the authorship that arrived both gradually and all at once. For a long time I have been more or less content with arcane researches that lead me into lush but impersonal lyric. Now I feel I must account for this anachronistic event; I'll follow it back to unspoken things. I want to make a story about the total implausibility of girlhood. This morning I'm at the round table under the linden tree...
"I'm sitting beneath the linden tree holding at bay the skepticism of my calling, describing how all at once, in a hotel by a harbor, I was seized by a kinship; how every slowly in weaving between cities and rooms, I became what I am not. Time has a style the way bodies do. There are turns and figures of iteration and relationship. But also times and bodies overlap. This work must annotate those parts of experience that evade determination. Here my fidelity is for the antithetical nature of the feminine concept. I was a girl. I could not escape desire, but now I can turn to contemplate it, and so convert my own complicity into writing. In this landscape time is pliable; it's a place of nightingales and poorness and wild cherry trees. Spring comes, slow and sudden. I'll work with that. I'll make this account using my nerves and my sentiment.
"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 tub of my pronoun."
Such a book cannot be summarized. I wonder whether her assertion that she 'wrote' the books of Charles Baudelaire has to do with readership as a participatory activity--the way we do complete an authors work by reading it. That we do in fact author, in a way, as we recreate the creative act in our minds.
But the writing is so beautiful, so intelligent and propulsively interesting, I don't miss the conventional novelistic devices such as dialogue and realtime scenes. it's motival writing, and certain images recur and recur, Poe's crimson carpet (Poe had a theory of furniture, who knew?)
So many tiny ponderable ideas, page after page after page, like this:
"The elemental hospitality of the inferior hotel, felt in the. minimal, even ironical welcome, the absence of an exaggeration or luxury that would leave one in its debt, the muteness and reluctance of the clerk: this is the stupidity I crave.'
It's a book I will read again and again, it doesn't exhaust its riches on the first read. I would put it on a very special shelf with Heidi Sopinka's "Dictionary of Animal Languages," Lindsey Darger's "The Sorrow Proper," Leland de la Durantaye's "Hannah Versus the Wolves" and in a strange way, Cortazar's "Hopscotch." Novels of form and novels of idea, written with precision and lyricism and a mad imagination.
The fractal of the title, I believe, refers to motif and metaphor, that kind of artistic and conceptual repetition on various scales. It's hilariously listed on A*zn in "Fractal Mathematics."
June 25, 2024
I was sitting alone in my den, resting my bean on the desk, when Jeeves shimmered in with a much needed restorer on a tray.
"Jeeves!" I said. "I bet you are clair... clair... well, whatever you say about birds who can guess what other chaps need! How did you know that I needed a drink?"
"It seemed indicated, sir," said Jeeves. "Your demeanour suggested that you were a bit distraught. And may I add," he continued deferentially, "that 'clairvoyant' is the word you are searching for?"
"That's it, Jeeves!" I said. "You guessed right. I am in a spot."
Jeeves didn't say anything, but waited for me to continue. But his right eyebrow went up by one-sixteenth of an inch, showing how perturbed he was.
"I promised to read and review this blasted book for the book club meeting this Saturday," I said pointing to the tome in question, which was lying on my table. "But I can't make head or tail out of it!"
Jeeves glanced at the book. "Ah, The Baudelaire Fractal, sir? Quite an amusing little novel, if I may say so."
I looked at him reproachfully. "Amusing, eh? You find this load of tripe amusing? Well, let me tell you, you are talking out of the back of your neck!"
"Maybe my choice of words was incorrect, sir." Jeeves said apologetically. "For a reader like you, accustomed to the simpler forms of literature, this novel might prove a bit opaque."
I was miffed. "So you mean to say that I am not smart enough to read this book, eh?"
"Oh, no, sir." The man was all contrition immediately. "Such a thought was furthest from my mind, I assure you. What I meant was that a novel of ideas such as Ms. Robertson's tome in question might not be palatable to a person who prefers more straightforward ways of narration."
It seemed that he was saying the same thing again, but I let it go. "Novel of ideas, Jeeves? What do you mean?"
"Well, sir, in an ordinary novel, there would be plot, characterisation, and a story that has a beginning and an end." Jeeves said. "Whereas in a novel of ideas, the characters are only mouthpieces for the author to expound upon his or her philosophy."
"Philosophy?" I was angry. I picked up the book and beat my fist against it."What philosophy is there in this bucket of bilge? There is this beazel, moving from room to room, talking about poems of this French chap Baudelaire, paintings of a lot of other French and Italian chaps, and the various dresses she wore. And half the time, she doesn't make any sense. I feel she's soft in the head."
Jeeves didn't say anything. When I looked up at him, his mouth had turned up one-eighth of an inch. The chap was smirking!
Seeing my stare, he again went back to his deadpan expression. "Sorry sir, I was not laughing at you. I found your rather simplistic statement about an acclaimed avant-garde novel a trifle amusing, hence my involuntary reaction. I regret if I caused distress to you, sir."
"Oh pshaw, leave it, Jeeves!" I waved my hand. "Like Aunt Dahlia's cook Anatole says, I can take a few roughs with the smooth. But you call this novel acclaimed?"
"Yes, sir." Jeeves said. "It's well thought of in literary circles."
"Oh?" Said I. "So can you tell me what it means? Especially when the popsy says she has written all the poems of the blasted French poet? It seemed to me like lying on a large scale."
"The tome in question, sir," explained Jeeves, "raises the point of individual authorship of any form of literature. The protagonist realises that the poems of Baudelaire belong to her as much as belongs to anybody else: remember, it was Baudelaire himself who said that in the works of Poe, he discovered his own writing. It is an interesting viewpoint, even if one does not agree with it, sir."
"Jeeves," I said. "This is pure apple sauce. You mean to say that nobody writes anything by themselves?"
"Anything original, sir." The corner of Jeeves' lip went up once again. "The novel works on the premise that everything is endless repetition. The author extends it not only to literature, but also to paintings, the dresses she wears, the perfumes she uses, and all her visual, auditory, olfactory and tactile sensations." He paused, and continued, a trifle disapprovingly: "As I said before, sir, one does not necessarily agree with it."
I was squirming like a stuck pig by this time. "You mean the author wrote two hundred pages just to spew this blasted nonsense?"
"Well, sir, in literary fiction the form is the content. One reads a book mostly for the experience of the text in general." Jeeves paused again. "The title is a good clue to both the philosophy and the structure of the book, sir."
"The title?" I said. "Oh yes, the fractal thing. I thought it had something to do with astronomy."
"No sir." Jeeves said. "A fractal is a mathematical pattern which keeps on repeating itself at different levels. As one digs down, one will find that the larger pattern is built up by smaller models of the same, ad infinitum. It's a fascinating mathematical concept."
I was silent for a minute. I could now see the seriousness of the pickle I had landed myself in.
"What do I do, Jeeves?" I wailed. "The Book Club expects me to speak on this book in a couple of days. I have to stand up and deliver a speech on it, in front of an audience of blooming intellectuals." I sighed. "I will look a prize ass, like that time I gave a speech at the girls' school."
Jeeves coughed deferentially. "Sir," he said, "that may not be required."
"Jeeves!" I exclaimed, hope arising in my heart. "You don't mean you have a plan?"
"I have devised a simple stratagem which I believe would be adequate for you to avoid this event, sir." Jeeves said. "Just inform them that you have laryngitis, and that you have lost your voice."
I shook my head. "Good idea, Jeeves, but it won't work. They will expect me to speak on it when I recover. I can't claim to have laryngitis for ever!"
"But your speech will be delivered this week itself, sir." Jeeves said. "I will do it on your behalf, based on the written review you have given me. I will represent you and read it at the meeting."
"Written review - ?" I started in confusion, but then illumination struck me. "Jeeves! You don't mean you will write a review and present it in my name?"
"I have already written a review, sir." Jeeves said. "When I saw you reading this book, I anticipated an eventuality such as this."
"Jeeves! You are one in a million! Thank you!" I hollered.
"I endeavour to give satisfaction, sir," said Jeeves.
"Jeeves!" I said. "I bet you are clair... clair... well, whatever you say about birds who can guess what other chaps need! How did you know that I needed a drink?"
"It seemed indicated, sir," said Jeeves. "Your demeanour suggested that you were a bit distraught. And may I add," he continued deferentially, "that 'clairvoyant' is the word you are searching for?"
"That's it, Jeeves!" I said. "You guessed right. I am in a spot."
Jeeves didn't say anything, but waited for me to continue. But his right eyebrow went up by one-sixteenth of an inch, showing how perturbed he was.
"I promised to read and review this blasted book for the book club meeting this Saturday," I said pointing to the tome in question, which was lying on my table. "But I can't make head or tail out of it!"
Jeeves glanced at the book. "Ah, The Baudelaire Fractal, sir? Quite an amusing little novel, if I may say so."
I looked at him reproachfully. "Amusing, eh? You find this load of tripe amusing? Well, let me tell you, you are talking out of the back of your neck!"
"Maybe my choice of words was incorrect, sir." Jeeves said apologetically. "For a reader like you, accustomed to the simpler forms of literature, this novel might prove a bit opaque."
I was miffed. "So you mean to say that I am not smart enough to read this book, eh?"
"Oh, no, sir." The man was all contrition immediately. "Such a thought was furthest from my mind, I assure you. What I meant was that a novel of ideas such as Ms. Robertson's tome in question might not be palatable to a person who prefers more straightforward ways of narration."
It seemed that he was saying the same thing again, but I let it go. "Novel of ideas, Jeeves? What do you mean?"
"Well, sir, in an ordinary novel, there would be plot, characterisation, and a story that has a beginning and an end." Jeeves said. "Whereas in a novel of ideas, the characters are only mouthpieces for the author to expound upon his or her philosophy."
"Philosophy?" I was angry. I picked up the book and beat my fist against it."What philosophy is there in this bucket of bilge? There is this beazel, moving from room to room, talking about poems of this French chap Baudelaire, paintings of a lot of other French and Italian chaps, and the various dresses she wore. And half the time, she doesn't make any sense. I feel she's soft in the head."
Jeeves didn't say anything. When I looked up at him, his mouth had turned up one-eighth of an inch. The chap was smirking!
Seeing my stare, he again went back to his deadpan expression. "Sorry sir, I was not laughing at you. I found your rather simplistic statement about an acclaimed avant-garde novel a trifle amusing, hence my involuntary reaction. I regret if I caused distress to you, sir."
"Oh pshaw, leave it, Jeeves!" I waved my hand. "Like Aunt Dahlia's cook Anatole says, I can take a few roughs with the smooth. But you call this novel acclaimed?"
"Yes, sir." Jeeves said. "It's well thought of in literary circles."
"Oh?" Said I. "So can you tell me what it means? Especially when the popsy says she has written all the poems of the blasted French poet? It seemed to me like lying on a large scale."
"The tome in question, sir," explained Jeeves, "raises the point of individual authorship of any form of literature. The protagonist realises that the poems of Baudelaire belong to her as much as belongs to anybody else: remember, it was Baudelaire himself who said that in the works of Poe, he discovered his own writing. It is an interesting viewpoint, even if one does not agree with it, sir."
"Jeeves," I said. "This is pure apple sauce. You mean to say that nobody writes anything by themselves?"
"Anything original, sir." The corner of Jeeves' lip went up once again. "The novel works on the premise that everything is endless repetition. The author extends it not only to literature, but also to paintings, the dresses she wears, the perfumes she uses, and all her visual, auditory, olfactory and tactile sensations." He paused, and continued, a trifle disapprovingly: "As I said before, sir, one does not necessarily agree with it."
I was squirming like a stuck pig by this time. "You mean the author wrote two hundred pages just to spew this blasted nonsense?"
"Well, sir, in literary fiction the form is the content. One reads a book mostly for the experience of the text in general." Jeeves paused again. "The title is a good clue to both the philosophy and the structure of the book, sir."
"The title?" I said. "Oh yes, the fractal thing. I thought it had something to do with astronomy."
"No sir." Jeeves said. "A fractal is a mathematical pattern which keeps on repeating itself at different levels. As one digs down, one will find that the larger pattern is built up by smaller models of the same, ad infinitum. It's a fascinating mathematical concept."
I was silent for a minute. I could now see the seriousness of the pickle I had landed myself in.
"What do I do, Jeeves?" I wailed. "The Book Club expects me to speak on this book in a couple of days. I have to stand up and deliver a speech on it, in front of an audience of blooming intellectuals." I sighed. "I will look a prize ass, like that time I gave a speech at the girls' school."
Jeeves coughed deferentially. "Sir," he said, "that may not be required."
"Jeeves!" I exclaimed, hope arising in my heart. "You don't mean you have a plan?"
"I have devised a simple stratagem which I believe would be adequate for you to avoid this event, sir." Jeeves said. "Just inform them that you have laryngitis, and that you have lost your voice."
I shook my head. "Good idea, Jeeves, but it won't work. They will expect me to speak on it when I recover. I can't claim to have laryngitis for ever!"
"But your speech will be delivered this week itself, sir." Jeeves said. "I will do it on your behalf, based on the written review you have given me. I will represent you and read it at the meeting."
"Written review - ?" I started in confusion, but then illumination struck me. "Jeeves! You don't mean you will write a review and present it in my name?"
"I have already written a review, sir." Jeeves said. "When I saw you reading this book, I anticipated an eventuality such as this."
"Jeeves! You are one in a million! Thank you!" I hollered.
"I endeavour to give satisfaction, sir," said Jeeves.
January 30, 2020
A few short passages from The Baudelaire Fractal:
Now I understood that I was haunted by the problematic ratios of sex and art, of anger and sadness. I’ve never solved them.
I had not yet been exposed to the fashion that would later become so attractive to me, the craze for transforming each experience into a concept.
In reading I continuously discovered the extent of my own incomprehension; it was so varied and complicated that it became my wealth.
Laziness in fact was my main form of vitality.
…nameless girl with your torn skirt, there’s nothing left for you but to destroy art.
The girls played in the half-dark. Their games expressed all the muted power and violence inscribed in the rooms of that dark apartment, its objects and surfaces and collections, and also in the spaces outside the apartment, in the city; the confining luxury constrained them to play out the erotic catastrophes of their parents as well as family histories and political damages and hatreds that I witnessed in the streets. The collections made a decor of the undersides of these stories. None of us had any choice, neither the children nor me. Yet in a mild, non-committal way I disliked the children, and the parents, and my tasks. I did this sort of work because it was the work I had been raised to do, but I did it resentfully and badly.
Weren’t all of my desires originated by an elsewhere? Isn’t this the structural experience of modern life?
So thoroughly have we absorbed the truth of this proposition of the work of the elsewhere within modern desire that it has achieved invisibility. It is part of the language of the advertisers and the artists as well as the colonizers. The binary structure is theoretically convenient. Every city and every dream is erotically charged by an outside: a voyage, an ocean, a dalliance in a cabin, in a dim provincial hotel. Swiftly the voyage recedes. We forget who we were then in the haste to succeed at anything. We forget who we loved and who we fucked over. The forgetting comes to animate our experience of what we next call art.
I was looking for a new life. I wanted to be as stupid as kissing, as dirty as a servant, as ripe as a blown-open diary, and I was.
Yet I am completely disgusted by literature. That’s why this is erotic comedy.
I wanted the gorgeousness in the tawdry and girlish, but I also wanted anger. Sentences had surfaces; I wanted them to begin to undo themselves, to careen into the impossible. A sentence could be a blade. My task was to free the sentence from literature. To free it from culture even, since both are owned.
Now I understood that I was haunted by the problematic ratios of sex and art, of anger and sadness. I’ve never solved them.
I had not yet been exposed to the fashion that would later become so attractive to me, the craze for transforming each experience into a concept.
In reading I continuously discovered the extent of my own incomprehension; it was so varied and complicated that it became my wealth.
Laziness in fact was my main form of vitality.
…nameless girl with your torn skirt, there’s nothing left for you but to destroy art.
The girls played in the half-dark. Their games expressed all the muted power and violence inscribed in the rooms of that dark apartment, its objects and surfaces and collections, and also in the spaces outside the apartment, in the city; the confining luxury constrained them to play out the erotic catastrophes of their parents as well as family histories and political damages and hatreds that I witnessed in the streets. The collections made a decor of the undersides of these stories. None of us had any choice, neither the children nor me. Yet in a mild, non-committal way I disliked the children, and the parents, and my tasks. I did this sort of work because it was the work I had been raised to do, but I did it resentfully and badly.
Weren’t all of my desires originated by an elsewhere? Isn’t this the structural experience of modern life?
So thoroughly have we absorbed the truth of this proposition of the work of the elsewhere within modern desire that it has achieved invisibility. It is part of the language of the advertisers and the artists as well as the colonizers. The binary structure is theoretically convenient. Every city and every dream is erotically charged by an outside: a voyage, an ocean, a dalliance in a cabin, in a dim provincial hotel. Swiftly the voyage recedes. We forget who we were then in the haste to succeed at anything. We forget who we loved and who we fucked over. The forgetting comes to animate our experience of what we next call art.
I was looking for a new life. I wanted to be as stupid as kissing, as dirty as a servant, as ripe as a blown-open diary, and I was.
Yet I am completely disgusted by literature. That’s why this is erotic comedy.
I wanted the gorgeousness in the tawdry and girlish, but I also wanted anger. Sentences had surfaces; I wanted them to begin to undo themselves, to careen into the impossible. A sentence could be a blade. My task was to free the sentence from literature. To free it from culture even, since both are owned.
April 16, 2022
Lisa Robertson, like Bolaño, Myles, Bellamy or Carson before her, is a middle-aged poet of some repute who is reaching her apotheosis by finally writing a novel with the precision of verse and acuity of deeply felt experience.
This is a book that can be read for the sentences alone - every one is springy with aphoristic wit and exhaustive thought. The hooky premise, of a poet named Hazel Brown waking up to find she's written the complete works of Baudelaire, is publicist-copy bullshit that is mentioned maybe twice. This is autofiction; the premise acts as a metaphor, representing a feminist retaking of the bohemian project.
Robertson's remembered Paris (not dissimilar to Vila-Matas' Paris of a decade earlier in Never Any End To Paris), her nameless boy conquests, her apprentice poetic work, her folding-in of fashion as a crucial artistic form - both challenges and continues her researched and imagined predecessors, chiefly Baudelaire and his French-Haitian lover Jeanne Duval, their contradictions, the humanity that must be exhumed and the humanity that pushes through time unavoidably.
This is poetry, memoir, history, philosophy and fiction, all simultaneously, made happily denser with endless fractal components. It humorously interrogates the self without cold irony; it illustrates the timeless appeal of bohemian freedom without sentimentality or judgment; it is an education in an artistic tradition without any dryness or didacticism. It is deeply personal without ever giving much away; it is a survey of the important moments in her life without solipsism, an ode to idleness that feels on the side of the worker and revolution. It is imaginative without being twee, coolly realistic without ever being hopeless. An ideal book.
This is a book that can be read for the sentences alone - every one is springy with aphoristic wit and exhaustive thought. The hooky premise, of a poet named Hazel Brown waking up to find she's written the complete works of Baudelaire, is publicist-copy bullshit that is mentioned maybe twice. This is autofiction; the premise acts as a metaphor, representing a feminist retaking of the bohemian project.
Robertson's remembered Paris (not dissimilar to Vila-Matas' Paris of a decade earlier in Never Any End To Paris), her nameless boy conquests, her apprentice poetic work, her folding-in of fashion as a crucial artistic form - both challenges and continues her researched and imagined predecessors, chiefly Baudelaire and his French-Haitian lover Jeanne Duval, their contradictions, the humanity that must be exhumed and the humanity that pushes through time unavoidably.
This is poetry, memoir, history, philosophy and fiction, all simultaneously, made happily denser with endless fractal components. It humorously interrogates the self without cold irony; it illustrates the timeless appeal of bohemian freedom without sentimentality or judgment; it is an education in an artistic tradition without any dryness or didacticism. It is deeply personal without ever giving much away; it is a survey of the important moments in her life without solipsism, an ode to idleness that feels on the side of the worker and revolution. It is imaginative without being twee, coolly realistic without ever being hopeless. An ideal book.
Read
January 13, 2020This meandering, philosophical novel takes place mostly in Paris but also Vancouver, London, and the French countryside. It’s the story of a young woman, Hazel Brown, who leaves home to try to live life fully. She ends up in Paris, trying to survive but mostly spending her time reading, thinking, and searching out experiences. She’s looking back on this history from the perspective of older adulthood. The novel is not driven by plot, but rather by ideas. Robertson explores identity in relation to art and literature: at one point, Hazel Brown wakes up to discover she’s written the complete works of Baudelaire. This bizarre event is a way to think about how we are shaped by language and how we shape it ourselves. The novel explores what it means to be a girl and a woman, how women are both subjects and objects of art, and how language, time, rooms, clothing, the mind, and the body intersect and intertwine. It’s brilliant, strange, and unlike anything I’ve read before.
https://bookriot.com/2020/01/08/indie...
https://bookriot.com/2020/01/08/indie...
September 23, 2022
“First, I knew nothing, then I believed anything, now I doubt everything.”I come to this book as a lover of Lisa Robertson's poetry. This, on the other hand, is prose. Or maybe poetry disguised as prose.
“What was desire then and what is it now? A kind of poetry maybe. A body of poetry. The opposite of identity.”I don't know what to say about this except I read it and enjoyed it while I was reading it in a sensual way, not being too bothered by the ideas that floated over my head, but enjoying the textures and sounds. I read it almost like poetry, reading many sections out loud. I read it as Lisa Robertson would say:
“It was rather like the solipsistic pleasure of very slowly skimming a book in late afternoon without truly reading, enjoying the pleasure of turning the pages and moving the eyes across print, revelling in its mute materiality without bothering about the intricacies of meaning.”She's interested in: borders, hotel rooms, bodies, poetry, beauty, the bizarre, art, entanglement, fashion, folds, authorship, invisibility, erasure, gender, freedom, capital, rhythm
It sometimes read like poetry, sometimes like philosophy, sometimes like a biography of Baudelaire or even a history lesson, and others like a feminist text, and of course at times it does make room to be a novel too.
“The freedom of desiring and its potent transformations seemed not to belong to beauty, just to beauty’s describer. Anyone without a language for desire perishes. Any girl-thing.”Although about the only thing that happens to the main character is that she goes to different hotel rooms in different cities, there is a boy that she kisses sometimes, and she thinks a lot about a lot of stuff. Oh and she had a nice morning jacket once but it was infected by moths.
“Time is my body, and it is also others’ bodies; it could next become sentences, and the reflexive pause within the phrase. This is grace, I think: the achievement, in the company of strangers, of the necessary precision of the pause. A sentence flourishes only as a pause in thought, which extends the invitation of an identification. The great amateurs of fashion understand this supple grace.”It seems like a thinly veiled memoir, a Künstlerroman more specifically, that as it progresses strips itself of its fictional frame until the novel almost disappears. To the point where at the end I almost wondered why it had to have the novel frame, why not just write essays and ditch the construct?
In a way, it reminds me of the last book I read: Checkout 19, in that both are thinly veiled memoirs about reading and writing and art. There are even some sentences here that could have been straight out of the other one (“It was the year before I read Arendt and Mallarmé. I had stumbled curiously within Wittgenstein without becoming committed”). And both are written beautifully. But other than those similarities, execution-wise they could not have been more different. This one is much more abstract and theoretical and "poetic".
“It brought me to the impure repetition of the Baudelairean authorship within myself, its formerness and presentness entangling or continuously supplementing one another without cancelling the tenuous autonomy of the authorship itself, which seemed now to wander, seeking perhaps a temporary room within which to surge into new time, stainlike, much as Baudelaire had wandered in claustrophobic decors, in unconscious imitation of his master Poe.”I wasn't "immersed" in the book the way I would be in a very good novel, yet I was immersed in the prose, in the very specific things she was describing and trying to link up in my mind, imagistically and theoretically, some of which I totally didn't get.
“What do I love? I love the elsewhere of moving clouds.”
Read
August 14, 2023I’ve read Baudelaire, Benjamin, Deleuze, Butler, et al. I have seen films by Varda and Cassavettes, and know the histories of fashion around Demeulemeesrer and Balenciaga and Yamamoto. So? Lisa Robertson’s book is one that would have been appealing to me a decade back, with infinite references to a bygone era of ideas and a time where referents had power. At its best, she provides wonderful color and context to the history of French intellectual life, and when she speaks about a youthful meandering for knowledge, I understood that. I think my anger for this book comes from contempt for the fact that her story, a work of autofiction, appears devoid of real obstacles or struggle. I would love to live a life of contemplation, one with minimal roadblocks towards approaching an artistic vision. Was it truly like this in 1984? Could one just live seemingly without working? And even without work, own cutting edge designer fashion?
Hazel Brown, the author’s autofictional persona, leaves for the UK without a clear objective aside from the art life. Her grandmother has just died, who we are told only sought the kind of observations from the world that populate this novel. And if you know what these observations mean, they’re not unpleasant. I found the novel almost hypnotic. But the central crux of the story, that the narrator writes the complete works of Baudelaire, seems kind of pointless overall. Her observations on Baudelaire are not, and neither is her observation of the woman dandy regarding these older authors. But why? Why does she write this? Why should I care about her? Why does her mysterious transcription of Baudelaire carry no weight by the end? Why didn’t she just write some essays?
Robertson’s writing is beautiful and smart. I also found this exhaustively pretentious. It would appeal to a certain New York audience and caters to that group wonderfully. However, I could not handle it for long. I hate having to work a job when I could simply ponder concepts. I would love not to struggle and simply imbibe life. Sure, she isn’t exactly bathing in a pool filled with gold coins, and isn’t living in a penthouse. But she’s never on the brink of nothingness either. Work is secondary. This book contains no debt - unpaid credit cards simply vanish with the dissolution of a Canadian mall. You wonder how she pays for everything and she provides a mild answer about a rich aged widow she briefly worked with one summer, or later, a number of inconsequential jobs like “freelance writing art criticism”. Suddenly, she is simply in the future and is successful. In this book, I saw no fractals but a straight line to the top.
I know I’m being hard, and maybe this is unfair. I haven’t rated this because I wasn’t bored reading it. But to me, such knowledge or freedom may have once been easy to attain, but that same path is now hard earned. Even my most dilettante friends blindly pursuing an artistic life struggle every day for it. This book contains no cost and no risk. Yes, it is wonderful and pleasant. But like taking a bath in champagne, eventually the fizz runs dry. I felt like many of her references were less about making a point and more about the accumulation of “cool points”
Maybe if the book were twice as long? A book with characters to challenge the narrator? Depictions of the work beyond what was meagerly presented? Filling in some of the obvious holes in the story with detail (is the pimp really a pimp?)
I did enjoy her reflections on diaries. Again, much to like. I just can’t appreciate dandyism any longer!
Hazel Brown, the author’s autofictional persona, leaves for the UK without a clear objective aside from the art life. Her grandmother has just died, who we are told only sought the kind of observations from the world that populate this novel. And if you know what these observations mean, they’re not unpleasant. I found the novel almost hypnotic. But the central crux of the story, that the narrator writes the complete works of Baudelaire, seems kind of pointless overall. Her observations on Baudelaire are not, and neither is her observation of the woman dandy regarding these older authors. But why? Why does she write this? Why should I care about her? Why does her mysterious transcription of Baudelaire carry no weight by the end? Why didn’t she just write some essays?
Robertson’s writing is beautiful and smart. I also found this exhaustively pretentious. It would appeal to a certain New York audience and caters to that group wonderfully. However, I could not handle it for long. I hate having to work a job when I could simply ponder concepts. I would love not to struggle and simply imbibe life. Sure, she isn’t exactly bathing in a pool filled with gold coins, and isn’t living in a penthouse. But she’s never on the brink of nothingness either. Work is secondary. This book contains no debt - unpaid credit cards simply vanish with the dissolution of a Canadian mall. You wonder how she pays for everything and she provides a mild answer about a rich aged widow she briefly worked with one summer, or later, a number of inconsequential jobs like “freelance writing art criticism”. Suddenly, she is simply in the future and is successful. In this book, I saw no fractals but a straight line to the top.
I know I’m being hard, and maybe this is unfair. I haven’t rated this because I wasn’t bored reading it. But to me, such knowledge or freedom may have once been easy to attain, but that same path is now hard earned. Even my most dilettante friends blindly pursuing an artistic life struggle every day for it. This book contains no cost and no risk. Yes, it is wonderful and pleasant. But like taking a bath in champagne, eventually the fizz runs dry. I felt like many of her references were less about making a point and more about the accumulation of “cool points”
Maybe if the book were twice as long? A book with characters to challenge the narrator? Depictions of the work beyond what was meagerly presented? Filling in some of the obvious holes in the story with detail (is the pimp really a pimp?)
I did enjoy her reflections on diaries. Again, much to like. I just can’t appreciate dandyism any longer!
December 14, 2021
Wow, just wow! I can't wait to read it again.
Read
October 6, 2025The prose in this was absolutely beautiful, I really enjoyed it. I forgot to add that Robertson talks a lot about clothing and tailoring in a way that really really makes sense to me SO GOOD
November 8, 2021
Alas, had high hopes for this original and deliciously written work. But, as the story continued on and on, I grew weary of the self-indulgence of this "female thinker". The net result is a portrait of an untethered, literature-loving, middle-aged woman (57) who lives, in the end, in shabby-chic poverty, in a "hut", with her dog. Her mind is full of memories of her poetic and sexual life experiences in Paris and Vancouver. Yet, aside from her continued musings on the unsettling conundrum of being a "girl", the author doesn't really, in my opinion, break new ground. The author never 'lets go' of the protagonist's constructed Self as a 'writer' within the story to 'become' the greater writing woman she apparently aspires to be. ( ~ Was that the point?~?) The main character remains shackled to the depressing and degrading prejudices of 'male' perceptions that ensnared her, at an early and impressionable age, as a female reader. ~ Poor thing! ~ That said, this stylized literary work is a word-loving salad that will appeal to educated students of 'Literature' who don't seek an up-lifting 'resolution'. It has been designed and written for those who like to whine and wallow.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 10, 2024
A joy. Recommended for girls of all genders trying to find themselves in Paris, in paintings, clothes and perfume, in poetry.
Caveat lector: this is a novel written by a poet; like many novels written by poets, it dispenses with such superfluities as plot, characters, conflict, dialogue.
What remains is a sort of baroque Bildungsroman, the titular fractal endlessly unfolding in time and language and cloth: wrinkles within wrinkles, creases within creases, pleats within pleats.
Caveat lector: this is a novel written by a poet; like many novels written by poets, it dispenses with such superfluities as plot, characters, conflict, dialogue.
What remains is a sort of baroque Bildungsroman, the titular fractal endlessly unfolding in time and language and cloth: wrinkles within wrinkles, creases within creases, pleats within pleats.
July 28, 2022
“With an obscure hesitation one steps into the day and its frame and its costume. Between the puzzlement and its summary abandonment, between the folds of waking consciousness and their subsequent limitation, is a possible city. Solitude, hotels, aging, love, hormones, alcohol, illness – these drifting experiences open it a little. Sometimes prolonged reading holds it ajar. Another’s style of consciousness inflects one’s own; an odd syntactic manner, a texture of embellishment, pause. A new mode of rest. I can feel physiologically haunted by a style. It’s why I read ideally, for the structured liberation from the personal, yet the impersonal inflection can persist outside the text, beyond the passion of readerly empathy, a most satisfying transgression that arrives only inadvertently, never by force of intention. As if seized by a fateful kinship, against all the odds of sociology, the reader psychically assumes the cadence of the text. She sheds herself. This description tends towards a psychological interpretation of linguistics, but the experience is also spatial. I used to drive home from my lover’s apartment at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. This was Vancouver in 1995. A zone of light-industrial neglect separated our two neighbourhoods. Between them the stretched-out city felt abandoned. My residual excitement and relaxation would extend outwards from my body and the speeding car, towards the dilapidated warehouses, the shut storefronts, the distant container yards, the dark exercise studios, the pools of sulphur light, towards a low-key dereliction. I would feel pretty much free. I was a driver, not a pronoun, not a being with breasts and anguish. I was neither with the lover nor alone. I was suspended in a nonchalance. My cells were at ease. I doted on nothing" (15).
"Of all stupid art the poem is the most stupid, a nearly imperceptible flick of the mop just beneath the surface of the water, an idle flutter of the hand. Very stupid; outside all good sense and discretion, because the poem must be indiscreet or not at all. It should just trail aimlessly in the hospitable water. Floating on the sea or swimming. It must be the sea, no other water. Waves, but not stormy waves, the slight rocking movement. This floating is like a hotel. Nothing interrupts the sensation; the body is supported and welcomed by a gentle neutrality" (32).
"Thus the colonial remnants of Kantian sublimity came to perch on an old lady's easel in my grandmother's spare room of a modest bungalow in suburban Toronto in 1971. I adored this room, its scent and equipment. I learned that there when I stood in front of paintings, I could feel an inner vibration. It entered flatly through the entire surface of my body if I let myself go blank" (41).
"Public morals are so vulnerable. A poem or a novel will endanger them, a young girl's desire will offend them, the skin colour of one's lover will diminish them. I long for moral abundance, an obscene flourishing of the category of morality. We can admit more, rather than less, embellish the capaciousness of the idea of the public" (73).
"What some people experience in crowds, amongst strange faces, on boulevards or in department stores--and this is what Poe had written of, the calm yet inquisitive interest in everything, without differentiation--seized mein these long galleries of paintings" (94-95).
"The emperor and his crony Haussmann had attempted to entirely subject public life to quantification by a totalized power. They invented a terrible ratio: popular spaces, customs, and expressions, once policed, could be transformed to markets. By 1857, the year of the publication and trial of his book, Baudelaire's birth city had been appropriated to the new scheme. In Haussmanian urbanism, the grid in its various ideological manifestations cut through and replaced the winding entanglements of life and art and desire in the city" (155).
"What we name invention is mostly recombination" (162).
"Of all stupid art the poem is the most stupid, a nearly imperceptible flick of the mop just beneath the surface of the water, an idle flutter of the hand. Very stupid; outside all good sense and discretion, because the poem must be indiscreet or not at all. It should just trail aimlessly in the hospitable water. Floating on the sea or swimming. It must be the sea, no other water. Waves, but not stormy waves, the slight rocking movement. This floating is like a hotel. Nothing interrupts the sensation; the body is supported and welcomed by a gentle neutrality" (32).
"Thus the colonial remnants of Kantian sublimity came to perch on an old lady's easel in my grandmother's spare room of a modest bungalow in suburban Toronto in 1971. I adored this room, its scent and equipment. I learned that there when I stood in front of paintings, I could feel an inner vibration. It entered flatly through the entire surface of my body if I let myself go blank" (41).
"Public morals are so vulnerable. A poem or a novel will endanger them, a young girl's desire will offend them, the skin colour of one's lover will diminish them. I long for moral abundance, an obscene flourishing of the category of morality. We can admit more, rather than less, embellish the capaciousness of the idea of the public" (73).
"What some people experience in crowds, amongst strange faces, on boulevards or in department stores--and this is what Poe had written of, the calm yet inquisitive interest in everything, without differentiation--seized mein these long galleries of paintings" (94-95).
"The emperor and his crony Haussmann had attempted to entirely subject public life to quantification by a totalized power. They invented a terrible ratio: popular spaces, customs, and expressions, once policed, could be transformed to markets. By 1857, the year of the publication and trial of his book, Baudelaire's birth city had been appropriated to the new scheme. In Haussmanian urbanism, the grid in its various ideological manifestations cut through and replaced the winding entanglements of life and art and desire in the city" (155).
"What we name invention is mostly recombination" (162).
July 14, 2020
Read it only if you fancy this kind of prose, the whole book is like that: "Garments, rooms, paintings, desire: in each of these perceptual frames, there is the feeling of the movement of time as an inner experience made available to sensing and the wilderness of interpretation by way of material borders or limits. Time is my body, and it is also others’ bodies; it could next become sentences, and the reflexive pause within the phrase. This is grace, I think: the achievement, in the company of strangers, of the necessary precision of the pause. A sentence flourishes only as a pause in thought, which extends the invitation of an identification. The great amateurs of fashion understand this supple grace. Garments can translate a city, map a previously unimagined mode of freedom or consent. A garment is a pause in textile. The pause admits untimeliness."
October 25, 2021
What a treat this book was to read. Sharp beautiful sentences. Lucious deep thoughts. Proustian, in that it is a dive into memory, from Robertson's perch of middle age, back to her young womanhood, as an aspiring poet who takes herself to Paris, seeking self-creation, a way into her own language, and it's much more than that. It's autofiction, fiction, essayistic, cultural criticism, gender interrogation, Baudelaire, his lover Jeanne Duval, sartorial creations, the arts, by a terrific wordsmith. A memoir that without exposing much exposes so much.
June 18, 2020
Witty, sexual, dirty & relentlessly smart. Loved this book. Can't wait to read more Lisa Robertson.
December 4, 2024
This lowkey like that Freaky Friday movie when Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis switch bodies
December 30, 2022
It was my goal to finish TBF by the end of the year. I almost didn’t make it because I could not resist lingering over the sumptuous sentences and descriptions. From summer to winter, I read the book on the patio and inside my favourite café, the Art House Café. I read it on my living room couch as the light shortened then began to lengthen. I finished it on new year’s eve eve, contemplating beginning a collection of cardigans in 2023. The work was sartorial, feminist, inquisitive, and delightful. I adored the character of Hazel Brown (HB) and her musings and forays into lust, art and materiality. I’m a long-time fan of Lisa Robertson. She is a writer who makes me feel as if I have permission to journey outside the realm of chronology and linearity through philosophy, art and literature via whimsy and intellect, but also through sensuality and pleasure. This novel will take you on paths you didn’t expect to go on. If you have the patience of reading slowly, if you carry a journal with you to scrawl the sentences out slowly and luxuriously, if you have a moths in your jacket pockets and are prone to leaving them in armoires, if you have a passing acquaintance with Baudelaire, or if you don’t, if you like well-crafted sentences, this book is for you.
January 22, 2022
This is a brainy book, a novel written as a memoir by the Canadian poet and artist Lisa Robertson exploring the role of women in the life and work of Baudelaire and her lifelong study of him. I was especially intrigued by the way she incorporated the fashions that were meaningful to her at different points in her life and the literal erasure of the women around Baudelaire.
August 14, 2020
I am not convinced that this is a piece of fiction. Rather I’d say it is a poem that happens to have a narrative arc. Probably that’s because of the punctuated lack of equilibrium of the subject, and I've come to associate poetry with that same sensibility.
To be more precise (using my own references for reality), I’d say "The Baudelaire Fractal" is a grimoire that has been activated – all the spells, or nearly all, at once. It's a thickening mist of intention, voices and undulating words, but not yet catching embodiment, not yet transitioning from wave to particle. In other words, the post-modern self in the hands of a crackerjack writer.
The multiplicity of selves allows for the female genius loci (Hazel Brown) to intentionally diffuse throughout the field-of-self Baudelaire’s abstracted corpus, and consequentially makes the perfect field-of-action in which to also publicize female mind, female experience, words, art, acts-of-creation, his-her-story.
A brilliant book, of course. Also love Robertson’s other poetry but I am sooooooo getting tired of this pre-corporation of selves. I think mostly because in that pre-embodiment state, this grimoire is like the body clenched but never quite falling into waking. Hypnagogia empowers, but only if its visions are acted on after waking. Otherwise its a movie told only via trailers.
To be more precise (using my own references for reality), I’d say "The Baudelaire Fractal" is a grimoire that has been activated – all the spells, or nearly all, at once. It's a thickening mist of intention, voices and undulating words, but not yet catching embodiment, not yet transitioning from wave to particle. In other words, the post-modern self in the hands of a crackerjack writer.
The multiplicity of selves allows for the female genius loci (Hazel Brown) to intentionally diffuse throughout the field-of-self Baudelaire’s abstracted corpus, and consequentially makes the perfect field-of-action in which to also publicize female mind, female experience, words, art, acts-of-creation, his-her-story.
A brilliant book, of course. Also love Robertson’s other poetry but I am sooooooo getting tired of this pre-corporation of selves. I think mostly because in that pre-embodiment state, this grimoire is like the body clenched but never quite falling into waking. Hypnagogia empowers, but only if its visions are acted on after waking. Otherwise its a movie told only via trailers.
June 6, 2020
In a feverish urgency reminding me of Marguerite Young, the narrator of The Baudelaire Fractal attempts a visceral reading of Baudelaire. Physical and linguistic existence merge:
The nervous fluid of a city is similar to a grammar or an electric current. Loving and loathing, we circulate. I myself did not exist before bathing in this medium. Here I become a style of enunciation, a strategic misunderstanding, a linguistic funnel, a wedge in language.
The purpose is augmentation:
To augment would be my work – to add the life of a girl without subtracting anything else from the composition, and then to watch the centre dissolve. It is exactly this sense of augmentation [...] that makes of the poem a possible space. The augmenter is the one who inserts extra folds into the woven substance of language.
This has been a fascinating read. There is, however, a lack of coherence, the book is patchwork, not garment.
The nervous fluid of a city is similar to a grammar or an electric current. Loving and loathing, we circulate. I myself did not exist before bathing in this medium. Here I become a style of enunciation, a strategic misunderstanding, a linguistic funnel, a wedge in language.
The purpose is augmentation:
To augment would be my work – to add the life of a girl without subtracting anything else from the composition, and then to watch the centre dissolve. It is exactly this sense of augmentation [...] that makes of the poem a possible space. The augmenter is the one who inserts extra folds into the woven substance of language.
This has been a fascinating read. There is, however, a lack of coherence, the book is patchwork, not garment.
July 19, 2022
Ooof this was hard to get into
January 3, 2022
I absolutely have no idea what happened in this book, except that the audiobook narrator has a very nice French voice and the language is very flowery. It’s heavy on the descriptions and light on the plot in a way that is very hard to keep up with.
Did I need more big brain energy to figure this one out? Maybe. It’s also possible that it is just not an accessible text? An example of a sentence in the book:
“Landscape is the same as painting, and it is the same as time, and cooking, and medicine, and the economy.”
It sounds nice, but your guess is as good as mine as to what that means. I can’t really recommend this because I do not understand it. That’s the review.
Did I need more big brain energy to figure this one out? Maybe. It’s also possible that it is just not an accessible text? An example of a sentence in the book:
“Landscape is the same as painting, and it is the same as time, and cooking, and medicine, and the economy.”
It sounds nice, but your guess is as good as mine as to what that means. I can’t really recommend this because I do not understand it. That’s the review.
December 28, 2022
Me gusta no saber dónde termina la novela y dónde empieza el ensayo, o al viceversa.
July 11, 2025
tw : mention du clinamen et du baroque de leibniz à dix pages d’écart (zéro vanne) 🚨
ma meilleure amie lorde, la popstar néo-zélandaise, adorerait ce livre, je lui recommenderai !
ma meilleure amie lorde, la popstar néo-zélandaise, adorerait ce livre, je lui recommenderai !
December 10, 2024
Intertextual, referential, and endlessly poetic
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