Paris Bride: A Modernist Life

by John Schad

Paris Bride is the third of John Schad’s powerfully original, fascinating, learned, and challenging experiments in life-writing; this time resurrecting the sparse and to some degree contradictory evidence about Marie Schad, his putative early twentieth-century ancestor. “This book,” writes Schad in his “Afterword,” “takes modernism to the courts for its dubious claim to accommodate what Virginia Woolf once called ‘the lives of the obscure.’” I must, however, leave it to the reader to become, as I have been, fascinated by this wonderful book and by responding to the difficult challenge of trying to figure out what is going on in it from sentence to sentence and page to page.

~ J. Hillis Miller, UC Irvine

358 pages, Paperback

Published February 21, 2020

About the author

Head of the English and Creative Writing Department at Lancaster University, England.

Reviews

[ipsit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting experimentation with modernist non-realism through the coincidence of time, place, and theme drawing from various literary techniques seeking as it does to give a name to modernism’s great vision of negation, or nothing.