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Schism Blue
Christina Tudor-Sideri's fourth book is a novel about intimacy and dressing absence in reinterpretation as an act of love. In the space between words, in the split between human and horizon, Edvard Munch’s shades of blue, the germination of desire, isolation, melancholy, despair, and the inescapable touch of forgetting.
Christina Tudor-Sideri is a writer and translator. She is the author of the book-length essay Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, the novel Disembodied, and the collection of fragments, If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces. Her translations include works by Max Blecher, Magda Isanos, Anna de Noailles, Mihail Sebastian, and Ilarie Voronca.
Christina Tudor-Sideri is a writer and translator. She is the author of the book-length essay Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, the novel Disembodied, and the collection of fragments, If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces. Her translations include works by Max Blecher, Magda Isanos, Anna de Noailles, Mihail Sebastian, and Ilarie Voronca.
- GenresFiction
190 pages, Paperback
Published March 12, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 21, 2024
“of where they will find themselves and lose the world, of where she will perhaps live by herself, if she were to find her way back to where the rain falls”
“They spoke of reality as a means to prevent it from suffocating them; they made from understanding and intimacy a path out of the world, like most people.”
“There was all this, and they did not remember it, and so they loved each other with other eyes, they touched each other in the dissipation of other blues.”
“throw it far into whatever waters will have it now, soiled by the mundane, into whatever waters offer to clean it and gift it to other times, to other years.”
“To let the world end here, on this street, in this tunnel, amidst these darkening waves, in this assimilation, in the infinite action of this absorption, embraced by this death, by this tyrannical need that pours down from the sky; to let water flood the very mouth conjuring this tale; to preserve nothing more, nothing than the eye that wanders and sees and gets lost in what it captures on its journey; to let the world end here: what inconceivable pleasure.”
“They spoke of reality as a means to prevent it from suffocating them; they made from understanding and intimacy a path out of the world, like most people.”
“There was all this, and they did not remember it, and so they loved each other with other eyes, they touched each other in the dissipation of other blues.”
“throw it far into whatever waters will have it now, soiled by the mundane, into whatever waters offer to clean it and gift it to other times, to other years.”
“To let the world end here, on this street, in this tunnel, amidst these darkening waves, in this assimilation, in the infinite action of this absorption, embraced by this death, by this tyrannical need that pours down from the sky; to let water flood the very mouth conjuring this tale; to preserve nothing more, nothing than the eye that wanders and sees and gets lost in what it captures on its journey; to let the world end here: what inconceivable pleasure.”
June 3, 2024
“I submerge my fingers in a blue not of the sea, nor of the sky, but a blue of the wintriest of hearts. Through this decantation, I survive the catastrophe.”
Christina Tudor-Sideri’s prose is an endless fountain of poetry. Her hand is that of a poet who has chosen prose as her verse, leaving us readers with pages brimming with beauty, melancholy, longing, passion, love and, in the case of her latest book, the color blue.
‘Days when the blue lies not outside but within.’
Schism Blue is a letter and tribute to Edvard Munch, “whose paintings have offered the marvelous backcloth of blue and separation into which [Tudor-Sideri] has weaved this story. At its center are two figures, a man and a woman. If you open the book, you see that these two figures have risen from a Munch work, standing on the shore staring out into the ocean—The Lonely Ones.
‘Sea and sky. Two humans. The lonely ones. The only ones. His hand in the color of her body.’
Tudor-Sideri has brought them to life as two lovers and artists who must find their ways back to each other through ink and paint, who must contend with the body, as living being, as corpse, as the body of work, where ink runs through the veins and blood on the page.
‘How strange to touch endless stretches of skin and say: how long this sentence, how heavy its meaning.’
While reading it, the scenes played in my head sometimes like an Alain Resnais film with disjunctive and fractured cuts, other times like a Marguerite Duras film in a room of silent and still interiority.
‘To vanish in the softness of nonbeing.’
I’ve said it before that her works are beautiful, but they hurt. Yet I think they can also help heal, if we take the time to truly feel them.
‘To be human, to be infatuated with the impossible, to be moved, to want to drink from the sky and from the sea and from the deep within the well of eternal life.
The stage changes, and here is time, the poet, creating darkness: the poem. And that too is paradise.’
Christina Tudor-Sideri’s prose is an endless fountain of poetry. Her hand is that of a poet who has chosen prose as her verse, leaving us readers with pages brimming with beauty, melancholy, longing, passion, love and, in the case of her latest book, the color blue.
‘Days when the blue lies not outside but within.’
Schism Blue is a letter and tribute to Edvard Munch, “whose paintings have offered the marvelous backcloth of blue and separation into which [Tudor-Sideri] has weaved this story. At its center are two figures, a man and a woman. If you open the book, you see that these two figures have risen from a Munch work, standing on the shore staring out into the ocean—The Lonely Ones.
‘Sea and sky. Two humans. The lonely ones. The only ones. His hand in the color of her body.’
Tudor-Sideri has brought them to life as two lovers and artists who must find their ways back to each other through ink and paint, who must contend with the body, as living being, as corpse, as the body of work, where ink runs through the veins and blood on the page.
‘How strange to touch endless stretches of skin and say: how long this sentence, how heavy its meaning.’
While reading it, the scenes played in my head sometimes like an Alain Resnais film with disjunctive and fractured cuts, other times like a Marguerite Duras film in a room of silent and still interiority.
‘To vanish in the softness of nonbeing.’
I’ve said it before that her works are beautiful, but they hurt. Yet I think they can also help heal, if we take the time to truly feel them.
‘To be human, to be infatuated with the impossible, to be moved, to want to drink from the sky and from the sea and from the deep within the well of eternal life.
The stage changes, and here is time, the poet, creating darkness: the poem. And that too is paradise.’
January 17, 2025
reads as a chronology of prose poems that eventually figure into a narrative. reflections on writing and memory as interactive forces of ontological generativity. the prose is rambling and wordy in the best, richest, most fluid way -- in a Proustian way. thematically esoteric and mystically interior in a sense that reminds me of Lispector, especially A Breath of Life. this book is a profound tribute to a love that devours and the grieving of it: what is written as "the tenets of separation" or "the logic of abandonment and the brutal essentiality of the wounded". it is relentlessly intellectually sentimental and raw, but I'm inexplicably left with the impression of optimism, or at least the sense of an appreciation of said essentiality.
I adored this so much that it was painful, in a narcissistic sense, because I will never write it and because it so plucked so precisely on the entire spectrum of my aesthetic literary tastes. I cannot overstate how much I have annotated this book, how many passages I have copied down.
I adored this so much that it was painful, in a narcissistic sense, because I will never write it and because it so plucked so precisely on the entire spectrum of my aesthetic literary tastes. I cannot overstate how much I have annotated this book, how many passages I have copied down.
the words are not formed on the page as hands are meant to form them, but rather they appear in chalk on the floor, in ink on the walls and in the air; and it is not always clear whether they do so by way of hands, if they were always there, or if, and that is something that the cross-textual nature of a life together might explain better than anything else, the nature of the opening to the Other, if the words are materializing from collisions and uncertainties, from mechanical praxis and the manner in which touch inscribes something on the body, something overwhelmingly intense, something so radical that no linguistic representation is possible, and in it there are words like extensions of potentiality.
Eyes like fingers called upon to compose the skin they touch, fingers like eyes called upon to materialize before him the universe of flesh that sleeps beside him...
July 28, 2025
DNF. Ass.
“All is language!”
It literally isn’t. You’re not a French deconstructionist. I’m pretty sure physical elements have to exist in order for language to matter. All this vaguery says nothing and accomplishes less. Never seen anyone smell their own farts as much as Tudor-Sideri does. Bushwick losercore. Awful.
“All is language!”
It literally isn’t. You’re not a French deconstructionist. I’m pretty sure physical elements have to exist in order for language to matter. All this vaguery says nothing and accomplishes less. Never seen anyone smell their own farts as much as Tudor-Sideri does. Bushwick losercore. Awful.
November 5, 2025
This book was quite beautiful and sensual and sad all at once.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews