Under the Sign of the Labyrinth

by Christina Tudor-Sideri

Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Philosophy. "There is no need to place your hand on a wound to feel it throbbing in pain. There is no need to see its root to know that a tree is dying. I am renouncing history. A film frame has lost its meaning. Vain and cruel, I have become a self that contains all negations to come, I have escaped the universe of time and space—page after page, touch after touch, train after train. I have become the idea of a sea beast moving in the deep. I have become the labyrinth. I am entombed in poetry. In the first stanza, in the last, in the blueness of thirsting ink—in the bruising of eternity. I have become alone. I am alone."—Christina Tudor-Sideri

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy

142 pages, Paperback

Published September 8, 2020

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is difficult to write about a book so hermetic at times yet also so immersive. There is the sense of being fully submerged in Tudor-Sideri's exploratory prose. As if we are underwater watching her doing what she is writing about doing. The turbidity of the water fluctuates. The silt settles, revealing glimpses of the crystalline structure Tudor-Sideri is building with words. But our journey clouds again as the fragmented nature of the text re-emphasizes itself, as Tudor-Sideri's 'fondness of striving for ambiguity' rises once more. I would not want it to unfold any other way.

Our history is a poem we get to reword over and over again—bending time, redefining moments, healing wounds, being gentle with our scars and the scars of others. A poem that is both deeply personal and universal, its lines taking the shape of stories we pour on ourselves and into the hearts of those around us. A poem we write time and time again, whether we are quarantined in the ruins or reclining in the light.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this unclassifiable memoir/meditation Christina Tudor-Sideri carries her readers on an intimate, embodied reflection on the body, the self and how our wounds shape who we become. Disappearing into her experience of growing up and living in Eastern Europe, she calls upon mystery, myth and dark beauty to craft a labyrinthine journey deep into the nature of being in the world.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2020/09/28/wa...

[Nathália · Rating 5 out of 5]

Felt like pressing a button that strips me naked and pours all my feelings out of me with each sentence. Astounding.

[Zoe Tuck]

Under the Sign of the Labyrinth is one of the first three books I received as a part of my recent subscription to Sublunary Editions. Of the three, it is the one I felt most immediately drawn to, perhaps from its size and shape (akin to Nathanaël’s The Sorrow and the Fast of It), or perhaps from its cover image: “Ariadne” by Jackson/Singer, taken from La Grèce pittoresque et historique by Christopher Wordsworth, Paris, L. Curmer, 1841, as I learn from the title page. In the system of book magic I practice, everything in the world is under some kind of sign, or is a sign itself—and there are few symbols more suggestive than the labyrinth, and the presence of Ariadne on the cover fixes the labyrinth as the one in which King Minos imprisoned the Minotaur. These features, and this sentence in Tudor-Sideri’s bio, “Her work deals with the absent body and its anonymous rhythms, myth, memory, narrative deferral, and the imprisonment of the mind within the time and space of its corporeal vessel,” in particular the gnostic heat coming off of its last clause. I joked in my newsletter, “Yes, yes, I know: we are supposed to love our bodies, which we 'are,' but don't you ever feel imprisoned within the time and space of your corporeal vessel?” because there is something pleasurable about the promise of going athwart the tiresome rectitude of the anti-Cartesian imperative (a similar pleasure is operative in Sara Ahmed’s critique of the happiness industry).

What does it mean to write something under the sign of the labyrinth? Read the rest here!

[Elytron Frass]

This is the most enchanted & Tarkovskian literary non-fiction I've come across. My eyes don't even see the words so much as the verdant wildernesses of its autoscopy. A prismatic dreamscape and a haunted memoir.

[Steven Felicelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I wrote about no longer knowing how to get to the other. About how I perform rituals and walk paths that always lead me back to no one but myself."

[Kristina · Rating 5 out of 5]

comparable to slow submersion into the grotto’s turbid waters, surfacing five days later, gasping for breath and resplendent in a pleasurably painful incandescence

[Justine Kaufmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

“For nature was allowed to dwell in madness-- it was allowed to create and thrive in its lunacy.”

In Under the Sign of the Labyrinth Christina Tudor-Sideri has given us a work situated beyond the bounds of classification. At times it is a memoir wrapped in a dreamscape, folklore, and the spirit of the natural world. Other times it contains meditations on philosophy, pain, trauma, and writing. But somehow, it is also a sort of conjuring, a yearning for something, hints of which can only be found within fragments and spasmodic imageries; within the histories, mythologies, and literatures that make up the self; within the prison of the body, where the union of pain and poetry is written into the flesh.


“To write of trauma is to negotiate the boundaries of life, whether it is a life hidebound by rules or the overabundance of a tree swinging the silence of the world on its branches.”

“I wrote about no longer knowing how to get to the other. About how I perform rituals and walk paths that always lead me back to no one but myself.”


“To plunge yourself into the depths of a labyrinth of your own making is to never escape it. To trick yourself that a prison of your own design is no prison at all."

[Ziyad Khesbak · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of lyrical essays meditating on the nature of the mind, corporeal existence, personal histories and mythologies, ontology, and so forth. There are real gems here but I found a deal of the work obscured by metaphors and symbolism that runs so unsubstantiated that it reads as a series of theses without explanation, truisms that only have meaning in the interior of the author's mind. Loose connections, statements delivered to writing by deep introspection the reader never undertook. But it is a unique kind of writing and Tudor-Sideri has interesting insights--I only wish I could have picked up on more of them. Sadly, not all word are for me alone.

[Greg Gerke · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I have never responded particularly well to the idea that time heals all wounds. In the cruel light of chronic pain, time appear more as a menacing vortex than a gentle healer."

Under the Sign of the Labyrinth is a very lyrical and precise multi-purpose book that blends memoir and essay, exploring the storehouses of memory in an uncommon manner, almost cinematographically, in the vaunted motion and content of a Tarkovsky shot--one of the author's exemplars.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful words. Maddeningly difficult to read. But I was up for the challenge. No clear answers, plot, setting - all up for interpretation. But some of the wisest, most beautiful prose I’ve ever read.

[Samuel Moss · Rating 4 out of 5]

A meditation on memory, myth, the body and nature, among so many other things.
Some very fine and poetry prose. Often times more poetic than most enjambed verse.

[Sean Edward · Rating 5 out of 5]

An beautiful experience where the reader falls into a undulating, somatic tunnel of memories.

[Jesse Farmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning.

[Jake Cooper · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tudor-Sideri tries very hard to be deep, with lines like "The genesis of poetry is expunged". I admire literary exploration, but this I couldn't get into.

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really profound, just a delight to read through.

[Cornelia · Rating 4 out of 5]

LE: A more lucid review, as I kept taking it off the shelf once in a while.

I might sometimes be the "princess of pretentiousness," but in the end, even this was a bit too much for me. A bit too-too much, to the point of slight annoyance. There is no substance, no real ideas—just impulse. Sometimes it feels like she is afraid of going deeper, fixated only on scratching a very beautiful surface. No real vulnerability, which, most of the time, is what makes great writing great.

At the same time, I still hold my stance on this: I don’t think I’ve ever come across writing as musical as this. “Amaranthine.” “Mellifluous.” “Labyrinthine.” The sentences seem to sing to themselves, while a mind unfurls—but to what end, I’m not sure.

Worth reading? Maybe. Still worth four stars? Yes—but only for the writing itself, which is indeed like a gathering of beautiful words I’ve yet to come across.