Разрыв

by Joanna Walsh, Джоанна Уолш

Интернет размыл границы времени, пространства и желания — как бы далеко друг от друга ни находились влюбленные, они всегда доступны здесь и сейчас. Так можно ли расстаться по-настоящему? На этот вопрос берется ответить рассказчица Джоанна Уолш, путешествуя по Европе и проживая окончание романа, который протекал по большей части онлайн. Это паломничество продиктовано случайностью. В поездах, автобусах, самолетах, на ходу, в перманентном движении Уолш осмысляет сложности превращения тоски в язык, переприсваивает и переизобретает статус писателя-путешественника, некогда доступный только мужчинам, и составляет карты городов, по которым исследует сложности современной любви. Она пишет об искусстве, скуке, стыде, старении, фотографии, браке, технологиях и месте, которое занимает женщина в публичном пространстве. Эта книга о границах — между местами, людьми, жанрами — и о том, как мы можем их пересечь.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Essays, Female Authors, Novels

263 pages, Paperback

First published April 19, 2018

About the author

JOANNA WALSH is a British writer. Her work has appeared in Granta Magazine, gorse journal, The Stinging Fly, and many others and has been anthologized in Dalkey's Best European Fiction 2015, Best British Short Stories 2014 and 2015, and elsewhere. Vertigo and Hotel were published internationally in 2015. Fractals, was published in the UK in 2013, and Hotel was published internationally in 2015. She writes literary and cultural criticism for The Guardian, The New Statesman, and others, is edits at 3:am Magazine, and Catapult, and created and runs the Twitter hashtag #readwomen, heralded by the New York Times as “a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers.”

Reviews

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

The desire to observe comes only where there is emptiness in place of emotion.
Kierkegaard, Repetition

Ex sounds like it should be a suffix, something in the past, but it’s a prefix, a beginning. As I am not a satisfactory ex, love is nothing from which I can begin to leave? Unable to exit as to stay, where can I go from here?

Joanna Walsh, in Deborah Levy's words "is fast becoming one of our most important writers”, a nod not just to the quality but also the quantity of her output in the last 5 years. This includes 3 books of short stories, Fractals (2012), Vertigo (2015) and Worlds from the Word's End (2017), a collection of short inter-linked fairiy tales about Sox Grow a Pair (2015), the non-fiction Hotel (a third book in 2015), and most innovatively the fully digital novella Seed (2017), which I must admit, as someone who only very reluctantly bought a smartphone for the first time last year, defeated me technologically.

Interviewed in the Irish Times (https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/bo...) in 2016, she explained her approach:

Q: In the last eight months we’ve seen three books from you – that’s a lot by anyone’s standards, never mind a debut author. How did that come about?

A: I did spend a few years working on the books, but you’re right: I write quickly. I’ve only been writing with any idea of publication since 2012, but I spent a long time before that in a state of deliberately not writing, of not wanting to put words to things, so that when I started, I had a lot of things to say. I not only didn’t want a “career” in writing; I actively told myself it was inappropriate.

I’m not very interested in the model of fat books, or books that an author spends a long time writing – not that I disapprove of it as something other people don’t do brilliantly, but it’s not for me.

In some other countries, it’s normal the think of a writer producing a book almost every year. In France they say, “C’est comment, le dernier Nothomb?” or whatever (“how’s the latest?”), and I love the way César Aira works too (around 80 short books in 40 years). Why shouldn’t reading a book be like going to the cinema: something that only takes a few hours, and that some people do every week. A paperback often costs less than a cinema ticket.

I think, perhaps, I’m fundamentally not a “novelist”, which is difficult, as that is so often synonymous with the word “writer”. I have urgent things to say, and I’m not sure it wouldn’t be a detour for me to do this via conventional ideas of narrative or character – but I also can’t stand the measured tone of many essays: I don’t come from a place where too many things are set in stone. I write hybrid things: my short stories are always ideas stories, often explicitly so – they can occasionally sound like literary criticism or a Wikipedia entry – and I love to write creative nonfiction or whatever you want to call it, but my work in this area resembles story as much as essay.

I have read and very much enjoyed Walsh's short stories from Vertigo and Worlds from the Word's End, but now from someone who is fundamentally not a "novelist", we have this, her debut novel: and at 272 discursive pages decidedly not a quick cinematic experience.

Break.up as the title suggests is a novel about relationships in the digital age, although, unlike Seed, one told in a relatively conventional sense: relatively at least in the sense of it being a linear story in a printed book, although this is still a hybrid thing, part travelogue and part highly erudite essay, and with no particular narrative drive as such.

Our narrator has recently experienced the end of a relationship, of just less than one year, one that was largely virtual, although Walsh has their first meeting being physical not online (so not a case of not-love at first-real world-sight). Her partner, at least in the narrator's retrospective rendition of him, seems to have kept their relationship within strict bounds:

Having everything to lose, why did I, do I, play your game?

Because if I let you have power over me, we have a relationship.

Their last physical meeting, in a hotel room, an example: she undressed at his request but he merely observed her, not even wanting to hold hands:

We never slept together.

We were together in Real Life for hardly more days than a working week and never the same place twice. I spent time in between places: on trains, on buses, in hotel rooms, on international flights. We met in city centres, nowhere else to go. We always met alone. We never met each other’s friends. Where did it all happen? In airports, in anonymous coffee shops - not really ‘in’ anywhere. Outside then: on park benches, on street corners. Most of all online, which can be something you’re ‘in’ like a net or a web, or something you’re ‘out in’, virtually limitless, a (Cyber) space. We met whenever there was WiFi, which is almost everywhere nowadays so that, when you left, there was never a space from which you could be erased, tidied over. There was never a place you weren’t, a place from which you could properly be missed.

...

I am still inside. I am in love. I love you, still. But I’m out of place everywhere. No places feel like places any more. They all feel like somewhere I have to get out of.

I don’t like places.
I don’t like being in the world.
I want a world of other people’s places, places I haven’t had a hand in.
I am leaving the place I know to find some new places.

It’s not entirely true that I won’t know these new places: does anyone know nothing of anything, now that nowhere is more than a click away?

She embarks on a month long trip across Europe from London to Athens and back again, taking in among other places Paris, Nice, Amsterdam, Sofia and Budapest, the novel a form of diary of her travels and the different cities providing a narrative drive of sorts. Some cities are new to her but others bring back memories, of her time with her ex (if that's the right word - You’re not even my ex, you told me once.) and her honeymoon from her previous, failed, marriage

Go to Berlin, since you were there once before, and you could in this way learn whether repetition was possible and what it meant. I had come to a standstill in my attempts to resolve this problem at home.
Kierkegaard, Repetition.

The relevance of Kierkegaard? For the trip she takes with her five books:

Alain Badou In Praise of Love
Soren Kierkegaard Repetition
Barthes Lover’s Discourse
and Andre Breton Mad Love and Nadja.

Quotes from these and other authors, with whom the author has said (see interview at end of my review) she wants to have a dialogue as they have covered similar ground, are included liberally within the book, intruding as sidebars, a technique that, I think deliberately, interrupts the flow of the text. As one example:

Reciprocal love, such as I envisage it, is a system of mirrors which reflects for me, under the thousand angles that the unknown can take for me, the faithful image of the one I love, always more surprising in her divining of my own desire and gilded with life.
Breton, Mad Love (tr. Mary Anne Caws)

More modern authors quoted include Chris Kraus, a particular reference point and Sherry Turkle,
Professor of the Social Studies of Science, MIT and author of Evocative Objects and of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.

The narrator also documents her travels with photographs, including in the text in Sebaldian fashion, or perhaps more like those in Sara Baume's brilliant A Line Made by Walking (and indeed both books feature the performance art of Marina Abramovic.)

Walsh's are not the usual tourist photos as the narrator sets herself the rules:

Avoid: museums, galleries, churches, tourist spots
Avoid photographing anything too ‘typical’ of the country
Avoid anything ‘beautiful’
(Try not to operate these rules too consciously)

Her first rule compliant attempt: I take some shots: wires crossing above the crossed train-tracks. As she observes: My photographs look like tourist photos gone wrong: ratés they say in French, which means missed, as in ‘I’ve missed a good shot,’ but it also means ruined.

As she travels, our narrator reflects on their relationship and also what it means to break.up in the age of social media. When wondering whether to contact her ex companion:

I didn't call you: instead I posted a new avatar of myself without my habitual dark glasses. I have learned: an image, any image, is a blind. A photo, a map, a drawing, all avatars give different information, illusions of contact called telepresence, none of them the Real Thing.

....

And your telepresence is fragmenting: when I type its first few letters into the menubar, my computer no longer turns up your name like an unlucky card (the King of Hearts again? There’s no such thing as chance). An intelligent machine, it has begun to forget you before I can. Your telepresence telescopes itself: a house of cards, every card the King of Hearts, a box of air, they collapse: it seems like nothing.

Unless it is not here that the great possibility of Nadja's intervention resides, quite beyond any question of luck. Breton, Nadja

There seems a deliberate nod here as Walsh herself as her own author publicity photo, featured in the cover pages of the book, has her wearing dark glasses:



and she has acknowledged her debt to auto-fiction which she traces back to Marguerite Duras and Natalie Sarraute. Notably, while the novel is clearly fictional, the narrator is notably called Joanna ... or perhaps not, as the name is mentioned only in an email sent from her ex, suggesting she divert her trip to meet him in Prague, and in the novel is preceded the recollection that all the time we wrote to each other you supplemented mine with the names of people from books. You called me Macabea (insignificant, ignorant, dirty) from Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, you called me Gudrun (bluestocking) from Women in Love, you called me (epicene) Shakespeare’s Viola.

For a novel about the break up of a relationship (our narrator also reflects on her failed first marriage) it is a curiously unemotional experience to read. I''m not sure I ever believed in the relationship: the set-up (or should that be set.up) feels more a vehicle for Walsh's thoughts and literary references, rather deliberately so one suspects given Walsh's view on writing conventional narrative and character driven novels. As the narrator confesses directly to the reader towards the end:

How could I have ever tried to build a story about love, which is all fragments? ... All these words and I still don’t know how to make art out of love.

And while the backgrounds of the different cities provide a useful (perhaps overly constrained) structure to the narration, this isn't a book to read for in-depths insights into each. Although, again, in a way that is Walsh's point - her narrator isn't the typical mansplaining travel writer, in contrast to her partner, who when he introduced her to his home town:

You gave me the facts, or things that sounded like facts - information, at any rate. I was surprised you thought they mattered. These were things I did not need to know.

Her short stories were notable for their word play. Someone she meets in Bad Benthof says:

‘I don’t like to talk on the internet. I always have to explain myself twice. I am not good with words.’

‘But you speak four languages.’ He has already told me: French, Dutch, Spanish and English. He understands a little German too, yes, he says. But not to write, no.

‘I’m the opposite,’ I say. ‘Also, sometimes a good writer will write something that means two different things, even at once, and in the same language.’

‘Ah,’ he says, ‘now that is very confusing.’

But in the (much) longer form, this is unfortunately rather diluted, albeit still present - for example in the following, rather Ali-Smith-like, musings:

Time flies like an arrow.
But then:
Fruit flies like bananas

Bananas are curvy so maybe time flies less like an arrow, more like a boomerang, or maybe time flies are the flies that zigzag below the square old-fashioned modern lamp in my apartment, turning back on themselves as they bounce off invisible borders.
...
There are no adjectives to describe time’s passage. It can last slower or faster, like a volume dial can turn louder or quieter, but no more than that: it has no texture, no timbre. Sound can be loud and cheerful, or loud and sad, or loud and aggressive, but time can’t be aggressive, or cheerful, or sad, not really, only the things that happen in time, which means these events must be made of a different material from time, though they are woven with it. It’s the quality of these events that turns time’s dial, speeds it up or makes it heavy.

which, inspired by a discussion of Budapest's bridges, is then followed by an extended riff on nodes, logos, the Königsberg Bridge problem and the travelling salesman problem. At such points the book is reminiscent of Olga Tokarczuk's MBI winning Flights, although Flights is superior - the most direct point of comparison is a discussion in each about the physical nature of airports. But the book that most came to mind when reading this was the Goldsmiths and Man Booker shortlisted C.

Overall - certainly a very worthwhile read, and one I suspect that may be in contention for the Goldsmiths Prize. But I preferred Walsh in the short story form - this experiment rather justifies her disavowal of novels, indeed for a non-novelist the book feels a little over constrained by the form (again contrast Flights, from a novelist, that feels much less constrained)

3.5 stars - rounded down to 3 for now.

Two excellent reviews - the first highlighting the strengths of the book, the second expressing some justified revelations

http://thequietus.com/articles/24388-...

http://www.drb.ie/essays/not-so-simple

Walsh speaking about the book outside the finest book shop I know:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yMtuY0h...

[Anastasiia Mozghova · Rating 5 out of 5]

пять месяцев спустя неожиданно перечитала и нашла тут еще больше всего.

в другое время и другом настроении я могла бы начать эту книгу и закатить глаза, но есть это время и это настроение. в них она показалась мне удивительной!

[Katia N · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ive recently read a few books by the English female authors experimenting with non-narrative structure of their novels (Sight, Kudos to name some). And I am really glad this trend seems to be developing in English-writing universe. It is refreshing that some writers dare to step aside from the storytelling and the plots, so much loved in English-speaking world, for the sake of concepts, ideas and self-expression. And, in my limited experience, they tend to be female.

Break.up is my first acquaintance with Joanna Walsh and it is her first novel. She is the editor of an on-line magazine and she wrote 2 collections of the short stories before. In this novel, the narrator travels between European cities escaping from the break up of her virtual relationship. The novel is structured around each city she visits while she reflects on the different subjects from boredom to a possibility of a story without a beginning or end. Almost each paragraph of her writing is juxtaposed with a quote from the modern thinkers varied from Michel Foucault to Gayatri Chalravorty Spivak. It seems, the author is inviting the reader to a conversation between the thinker and the narrator. She generally tries to keep the reader involved and even directly addresses her/him a few times in the duration of the book.

In general, I think the book has got its inspiration in French literature, especially in Nadja. Though, i would not call it surreal in the content. But the form definitely similar. The text is accompanied by the small photographs taken during the trip and they are framed in a similar fashion as Breton’s pictures in “Nadja”. I really appreciated the photos as a quirky and relevant complement to the text.

I liked her transgressions. One thing which did not work totally for me is her preoccupation with the broken relationship. In spite of the narrator’s taking time discussing the roots of her adoration for this man, I could not see what attracted her in him. And the feelings were depicted too cerebral for me to relate to them.

Overall it is the book of thinking. I will borrow the one of the quote included in book: “You now begin to see how this lady is: she goes on thinking at all times. She won’t simply cry, she will ask what crying consists in. One tear, one argument: that’s how her life goes on” (Martha Nussbaum) That would perfectly describe the narrator and the book as a whole. I bet some people would find it pretentious. It would be probably inevitable discussion whether it is a novel. But I found it fresh and thought provoking if slightly lacking in raw emotions. But then, should they be everywhere in the female writing? Even if it is about love…

[A. H. Reaume · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really, really liked this book but also felt it participates in the disturbing and long history of intellectuals/writers conflating infatuation with love. Other perpetrators? Proust, Barthes - way too many to count.

This is a book about being infatuated with a love object that is mostly a projection of your own psyche and desires. A love object, not someone you can yet see as a full and independent person. An infatuation and not the full flowering and complexity and mess and diurnal care and kindness that love entails. She’s talking about feelings and projections at the beginning of a relationship that never took off - not history or the sustained actions of care that make up actually loving someone.

These feelings of infatuation are a BIG part of being human and I really enjoyed how she dealt with them. I will return to this book often. But that doesn’t prevent me from also posting this review quibbling over the semantics of her project. ;)

I just think it's dangerous to mislabel this as love. This isn't just the author doing this - it's a common trope. But infatuation is often a violence to both yourself and your love object. It is both self-flagellation and an erasure of the other person in favour of your projection of them. That is not 'love' and I think it is disturbing we so often call it that.

[Frank Karioris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my cup of tea. Or water. Or salt bath. Or unagi. But it is my pressure cooker, with rice on the side. Takes 20 minutes to cook rice in a rice cooker. Hamburgers are (supposedly) originally from Hamburg. But one must think that the cheeseburger is originally from the town of Cheddar.

[Susie Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

reading clarice lispector simultaneously you see how intricately linked these writers are, and maybe that walsh is borrowing slightly much from one of her heroes. but she picks up where barthes leaves off in 'lovers discourse' about mania for the romantic object and through travelling sheds different parts of her obsession around europe. it had a lot to say about the way we abstract our lovers and ourselves when we are alone.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Love takes place in the conditional which is not even a tense but a mood,” writes Joanna Walsh late in BREAK.UP, “twinned with the wishful thinking subjunctive.” It is a beautiful line, to be sure, suggesting something like a ‘grammatology’ of the amorous, to borrow from Jacques Derrida, and my suspicion is that not many who have lived sufficiently (qualitatively, quantitatively) to have established adequate perspective are likely to be spurred to reproach by the statement. The conditional is contingent. I am certain most of us have experienced the transmutational mood atmospherics of coupling. Who has not done heartache, done the corresponding disillusionments with regards to the beloved? Have you (or are you able to) come to understand the role of the “wishful thinking subjunctive” in terms of how it was you came to project the role of the beloved onto the Other? What are our amorous disillusionments if not precisely the operational failure of our illusions? To love serially or, hell, only just twice: the subjunctive has to assert itself again (and usually again and again), a woozy amnesia insinuates itself. I believe that as we age, repeated disillusionments having applies their pressure, we have a tendency to fall out of love with love, to grow increasingly less romantic about romance. We grow less woozy. Ideally. What I suspect never abandon us are the basic drives that compel us to reach toward intimate connections, whatever form they may take. Wisdom and experience, processed adequately: they must lead to better comportment in the realm of love, desire, intimacy. Mustn't they? But nothing can dispel the destabilizing capabilities of the essential challenges, or not altogether. The essential challenges: having a self (or something like it), having the Other (and desiring intimate proximity), and having a world (far more than merely a mood atmospherics of two). I continue to struggle with these things as, I am certain, do each of us. Joanna Walsh continues to struggle with them and in BREAK.UP they are her subject. Walsh, though an accomplished writer of note, was not familiar to me before I impulse-bought BREAK.UP. What attracted me to the book, discovered on a dear seller's shelf, was first and foremost that it self-evidently belongs to a species of autofiction currently being published at the redoubtable Semiotext(e), to one extent or another under the auspices of Chris Kraus. The write-up on the back, along with accompanying blurbs, speaks to this. I’m also the kind of fellow liable to be won over by a cover featuring an image appropriated from Chris Marker. I have had in recent years some difficulty shutting up about my paradigm-altering encounter with Semiotext(e)’s 2010 translation of Pierre Guyotat’s COMA, the most important book I have read in my soon-to-be-over thirties. It would seem that IN THE DEEP, the other key 21st century autofiction by the nearly-octogenarian Guyotat, has caused more excitement, perhaps especially in the aftermath of Semiotext(e)’s 2014 English trans, but it is COMA that I read first and which remains the more personally meaningful, suggesting to me as it does an actionable model for ecstatic overcoming. Its uncommon spiritual power! Its remarkable literary razzle-dazzle! Semiotext(e) has subsequently published a number of classics in the autofiction mode, such as Hervé Guibert’s fascinating 1989 masterpiece CRAZY FOR VINCENT in 2017, as well as contemporary works from crucial voices, such as Jeanne Graff's very fine VZSZHHZZ in 2018. When I recently read Jacques Derrida addressing the autofictions of Hélène Cixous in his 2002 H.C. FOR LIFE, THAT IT TO SAY … I found myself both touched and further enflamed, dovetailing as Derrida’s reading does with another of my recent obsessions, Clarice Lispector, a writer who likewise had a major impact on Cixous. Last month I read New York Review Books’ new edition of Gregor von Rezzori’s sprawling ABEL AND CAIN, perhaps the publishing event of the year. At one point von Rezzori’s narrator-surrogate tells us that novels should be autofiction precisely because of what we learned from Werner Heisenberg: the observer always affects what is observed and vice versa, the self and its world cannot ultimately be disentangled. There is something to this assertion, at least to my mind. Now, it is not that I am suddenly gaga for memoirs and autobiographies in all their tawdry miscellany, though some of these too will continue to be of interest. I am not looking for anything and everything with the self as its subject or locus, and no manner of coercion is ever likely to compel me to produce a conventional text of this kind. Gregor von Rezzori’s introduction of 20th century developments in quantum mechanics in ABEL AND CAIN is emblematic of the kind of literary self-encounter I am currently excited about, situating as it does writing with the self as fulcrum in terms of a far more encompassing set of considerations, married as these must be to coterminous historical and discursive developments, mindful of new horizons, new connective potentialities. I want a literature of the self heavy on the literature. What has perhaps most appealed to me regarding works of this kind published by Semiotext(e) over the past decade is a tendency in these texts to: a) address phenomena of self (or something like self) parallel to engagement with philosophy and theory, especially with the collapse of the the subject’s autonomy mobilized (or perhaps merely accelerated) by poststructuralist discourse; b) restlessly seek out new literary forms, new forms being demanded. Joanna Walsh’s BREAK.UP is an exemplary text in both respects. It is doing precisely what I would have it do. You might call BREAK.UP a love story that is also a breakup story, a letting go that cannot let go. It is also a literary travelogue (complete with photos) in which our narrator-surrogate—that she is called “Joanna” is made clear on one occasion only—travels from her home in London to Paris, from Paris to Nice, from Nice to Milan to Rome, from Rome by air (the only time she flies) to Athens, from Athens to Sofia to Budapest, from Budapest back to Paris and then Amsterdam by way of Brussels, from Amsterdam to Berlin, and finally from Berlin back to London. The itinerary is a kind of loop, but the hope is that the traveler will exacerbate her own conditional groundlessness, will enact a fall so decisive as to cancel out all previous connections, especially that to a man she loves or has loved … a man she originally met online … a man she has met in the flesh, with whom she has even slept, but with whom she has not had sex. The experiment consists of two primary parts: a) the trip itself, a “falling” into enhanced groundlessness; b) the writing the trip precipitates, the book we are reading, primarily addressed to the “you” that is that man the loving of whom frustrates, only for the “you” to finally become “him,” though “the wishful thinking subjunctive” has been anything but neutralized. Joanna brings books with her on her trip. Books by Alain Badiou, Kierkegaard, Roland Barthes (A LOVER’S DISCOURSE of course), and André Breton. The book Walsh has produced, BREAK.UP, is peppered throughout with epigraphs relegated to the margins and very much reflective of what is happening in the text adjacent to them. The citations are more than mere marginalia and they are not extracted exclusively from the books Joanna has brought with her on her continental galavant. She tells us that she has been reading the great thinkers on love. For the past year. The accompanying choir is a large one. You’ve got Freud and Lacan. You’ve got Derrida. You’ve get Walter Benjamin, Ann Carson, a stacked roster. You have Chris Kraus as well, quotations from I LOVE DICK, ALIENS & ANOREXIA, and an Artnet interview. BREAK.UP would seem very much to exist (self-consciously so) within the Semiotext(e) continuum. If the book is peppered with epigraphs throughout, it starts with a standalone, the twin WEBSTER’S definitions of “break up,” the expression officially denoting both “To end a romance” and—over and above that, literally coming first—“To cease to exist as a unified whole.” This double definition mirrors the double-movement operative within the text, a book about trying to extricate oneself from a romantic entanglement and about an experience of self-fragmentation, of personal dissolution. “OK, OK, call it a selfish book then: self-ish, like ‘childish’—analogous to, concerned with, but not quite self, just as blue-ish is sort-of-but-not-quite blue.” This is a conception of self (the self-ish) very much married to discourse in the aftermath of poststructuralism. Though Walsh does not address it, I thought of philosopher Gilles Deluze’s concept of “haecceity,” his preferred word for self-ish, a phenomenon like a self but lacking any legitimate ontological autonomy, radically contingent as such. BREAK.UP begins with the line “All love stories begin with I.” Later we will be told that they end with I as well, if only in terms of the inevitable breakup (or break up). A ‘we’ has been tenuously mobilized, has perhaps been mutually desired, there has been a relationship, but something has happened … and there is no ‘we.’ Breakup, from I back to I: “any love story told is evidence of singularity, of separation, of love’s failure—or success—at any rate proof that love has moved on elsewhere.” Two extremely pertinent things happen very quickly in BREAK.UP. First, in the second paragraph, the narrator beholds her reflection in a mirror in a bathroom at Eurostar Departures, St Pancras Station, London. One will very likely reflect upon the psychoanalytic concept of the “mirror phase,” the moment (and its echo) when the child beholds itself in the mirror and begins to understand its fundamental differentiation from both the background and the distinct objects surrounding it. It is by looking into the mirror that the child experiences a becoming-subject, the emergence of self-ishness. In psychoanalytic theory, this introduces a trauma, an experience of painful lack, of exile, the loss of maternal symbiosis, an experience of a unity cruelly terminated. In our amorous contacts we are in a sense seeking a return to symbiosis, but our intellect is too sophisticated to see that as practicable or really even the actual issue, so we end up confused and aflutter, haplessly deceiving ourselves as is our wont. Shortly after the experience of the mirrored reflection of self, Joanna is in the London underground, or recalling having been so, and there is passing mention of the ubiquitous warning: “mind the gap.” This is just as central as is the mirror. BREAK.UP presents in its fragmentation and interrogatory literary performance a great many conceptions of and encounters with gaps. There is surely the gap between the lover and the inscrutable beloved. There is the gap between the provisional subject and her world more generally. The self and itself, unity and lack. The gap routinely interjects itself, often with a casual elegance. Fairly late in the book, a nice almost parenthetical line (featuring curious utilization of the comma): “Once it was difficult to track down old songs but, online I can telescope the gap.” The gap also represents more generally the in-between, the experience of a certain kind of travel, even just the geographic interstices between cities. There is also the Net and the experience of a kind of groundless oscillating connectivity, a 21st century atemporal manifold which is nevertheless experienced by the person on the ground from a mobile position of in-betweenness and flux. It is no small matter that as Joanna begins to head South into France her phone is no longer “connected.” Also very important is the gap between human intelligence and machine intelligence, though as readers of James Bridle’s fascinating NEW DARK AGE will be aware, the latter is only intelligible in terms of the input and hence the limitations of the former. We tend to judge machine intelligence in terms of its qualities of mimicry. Walsh: “The best algorithms work loosest, bypass hard rules of grammar and logic: they’re the ones that sound most human.” Joanna at one point attempts to transfer a JPEG to an email and a glitch renders the image as pure code. She notes that the code is not simply binary code, it is far more complex, it is in fact very purely a kind of writing. Notice the gap between this and her saying elsewhere that writing makes love “artful.” It is also pertinent that Joanna's work with love, tied as it is to a particular kind of self-enforced ongoing displacement, replicates machine intelligence in its self-conscious insistence on the primacy of pattern recognition, roving systems coordination. (We have felicitous commentary from Marshall McLuhan off in the chorus of the margins.) Joanna is a networked intelligence, but she is out to sea … on purpose. She is forcing an encounter with some kind of limit. What is the limit? In dialogue with Gayatri Spivak and her essay “Echo” (cited here as CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK?), Joanna begins to suggest that her beloved might play the role of Narcissus and she that of Echo. Notice this tidbit from the text proper: “People seek love anywhere there’s a sign of it, anywhere love performs word triage: listens, sorts, rearranges and feeds words back. I that all I did? Is that all you needed?” The role of Narcissus has been imposed, projected onto the beloved by the voice we are reading. The experience of limit in BREAK.UP very much has to do with the Joanna voice, this writing-as-performance-as-search-alongside-a-journey, encountering the beloved it is in the process of projecting outward very much at the limit of its own reaching, thereby absorbing this phantom Narcissus. It is not then a matter of a definitive breakup, of Narcissus being expelled. Narcissus and Echo come back together because they both belong to Joanna insofar as they both belong to a fractured self-identification, the beloved merely instrumental. This is not to be confused with wholeness, we might simply say that it constitutes both a self-reckoning and the closing of a gap. If Narcissus is neither expelled nor excreted, neither is the beloved. No breakup can be definitive. The simplest answer as to why this is (and must be) probably has to do with that wonderful expression cited at the beginning of this review, “the wishful thinking subjunctive,” which might simply be a phase for something Freud would have categorized as “drive.” That being said, the real wisdom of the book (and Joanna is skeptical of wisdom, believing for good reason that the truly wise cannot possibly have lovers) rests in one beautiful bit, very much consonant with how I myself read the uncertain terrain (Google Maps cannot help you): “By leaving Nadja’s fate unexpectedly open, Breton allows her to be the first to leave. And this may have been an act of love.”

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The closer we got to ending the fewer words we used, until we were shocked to find these words no longer decoration, but that we had come to fulfill them. How horrible to discover ourselves finally at the mercy of what we meant.”

(I’d give this ten stars if I could.)

[river smallflower · Rating 5 out of 5]

goosebumps goosebumps goosebumps. had to TRY to take my time with this because i was zipping right through it. joanna's words shook me and made me think and, quite a few times, made me say "ah! I was going to write that!!!"

[Declan · Rating 3 out of 5]

My review is here:
http://www.drb.ie/essays/not-so-simple

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Euro-travelogue with footnotes embedded in the text.

[Angbeen · Rating 5 out of 5]

my favourite of the Internet Novels that i've read in my time, probably because it doesn't read as someone attempting to write an Internet Novel as much as it feels like what is a pretty universal story being situated within a wider technological and societal context in a way that is sharp, interesting, and very emotionally compelling. it's got meditations on e-dating poetics, the affective experience of travel, and heartbreak + loss. if i could take a highlighter to the whole book i would

[jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Nipuni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alas because i am a f/w reader and not a s/s reader this took ages to finish but what a marvel

[Karoliine · Rating 2 out of 5]

god this was pretentious and annoying

[Benjamin Aleshire · Rating 5 out of 5]

I inhaled this book. It’s so good! Even after finishing it, I leave it on my desk and open to a random page whenever my love life needs a dose of bibliomancy divination. It gives me faith that writing (and thinking) about love really can be reinvented. And it’s also a novel that manages to confront the digital world in a surprisingly honest way, and refract it through the prism of philosophy. (If you like Maggie Nelson, you MUST read this book.) But unlike the marginalia quotes in The Argonauts, the text of Break.up is literally broken up by other texts. Italicized philosophic quotations indent into Walsh’s paragraphs, as her protagonist tries to make sense of leaving and being left, the falling in and out of love, the finite nature of our bygone analog world and the infinite free-fall of the digital one. (She has another great book called Vertigo, that I highly recommend as well).

Simultaneously, Break.up is a travelogue, some of the most intoxicating travel writing I’ve read in a long time—maybe because her protagonist is both tourist and anti-tourist, who doesn’t fall prey to easy romanticization. Paris, Rome, Budapest, Sofia, Nice, Munich, Amsterdam, a dizzying blur of cities where she becomes both pilgrim and flaneuse, trying to unravel her desire and obsession.

Break.up is smart as hell, but it’s also extremely readable. You don’t need to have studied the sources for the Alain Badiou quotes (I haven’t) to enjoy it. Walsh’s style moves in smooth logic and is littered with wry moments that still stick in my mind (my favorite: “Boredom is a dom.”)

It’s somehow a bit of a literary mystery, or thriller, as well. Walsh hooks us in a state of suspense—we don’t know exactly what happened between these lovers, so the digital correspondence tracing their break up become almost like clues. There are photographs punctuating the narrative as well, curious visual mementos that enhance the protagonist’s mysterious journey, which feels startlingly real. It’s fierce and feminist, and also tender and filled with yearning. Existentially sexy. “returnreturnreturn”, Walsh’s narrator writes, while hitting the space bar in an email, like a twitter-bot programmed to sing Nietzsche’s concept of eternal-return to the tune of “Ne me quitte pas”. Don’t leave me.

I can’t recommend it enough.

[Ira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Книга была куплена на нонфикшне, потому что у меня нет силы воли, а но киддинг пресс соседствуют с попкорном. Люблю книги, действие которых происходит в интернете, и это общание меня и соблазнило.

С другой стороны, неизменно раздражает, каким устаревшим является печатный интернет. Письма и жж, наверное? Когда-то и мой интернет так выглядел, но он меняется каждый день. Хотя, с другой стороны, пока напишешь книгу, найдёшь издательство и напечатаешь её — твиттер успеет ввести аудиокомнаты и увеличить количество знаков до 280, так что, может, я несправедлива. В этом фанфикшн лучше, мобильнее, он здесь и сейчас.

Но любые размышления про людей в сети меня очень привлекают.

Другое дело, что где-то на середине героиня (отправившаяся в путешествие в офлайн, чтобы забыть своего онлайн-мужика) всё-таки выпадает из сети и пытается впитать европейские столицы вокруг себя. И тут я ей завидую до жути, а она унылое говно и видит только унылое говно вокруг себя.

Пока читала, думала, ��то будет скорее три звезды, чем четыре, но в её пользу сыграли:
✌️ очень крутая бумага и вообще классное издание, наслаждение в руках держать
✌️ не та концовка, которую я ванговала — что не обязательно хорошо, но я не угадала и это плюс
✌️ роадтрип + обсуждения жизни-в-интернете — всегда вин!

Из минусов:
👎 очень унылая героиня, я не могу
👎 адовый абьюз он и в интернете адовый абьюз :(

No Kidding Press крутышные крутышки. 🎀

[Mia · Rating 2 out of 5]

i really wanted to like this one, but it was such a letdown :( it should be right up my alley - woman travels europe to get over someone she never really dated, but exchanged many (often erotic) emails with… that’s so me. but honestly this whole thing could’ve been a short story. there were individual lines i found beautiful, and the writing isn’t bad, but i spent the whole book Waiting for Anything to happen and nothing ever did. i also wish her ex had been humanized more - autofiction especially abt exes is only compelling if we understand why you loved them in the first place, but every line of dialogue from the ex is the most hurtful thing i’ve ever heard, and it had me wondering why the narrator even misses him. we never see any of the good parts, just his cruelty, which makes it hard to become fully invested in her emotional landscape. ugh. idk. i’m bummed out

[Emily · Rating 1 out of 5]

There were certain sentences in this book that were just wonderful. Perfectly written, an exact summary of emotions, thoughts and feelings at a moment in time.

However, the style in which it was written was awkward and difficult to read. It was not an easy book to read or enjoy and I had to really force myself to push through it and finish it. It felt part fiction, part essay, part real-life experiences and it was hard to separate the parts.

It was obvious that a lot had gone into it and that was admirable but I could not say that I enjoyed reading it nor could I recommend it to anyone else.

[Katrine Solvaag · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m always excited when I come across another female author within psychogeography. It’s a well written account of her journeys around Europe while dealing with a break up, while weaving in quotations from a selection of novels.

I really enjoyed the format and the emotions, though I think at times the topic digressed just a bit more than I would’ve preferred. I wanted more of the human and less of the academic.

[Jon Paul Roberts]

walsh writes about that which is difficult to describe and does so in a way that is deeply captivating. Break.up is maybe a little longer than it needs to be - its central premise (while interesting) doesn't quite sustain 260 pages - but the ideas it raises around connection, travel, love, and isolation are super interesting.

[a r g]

and you bet i cried

[A · Rating 3 out of 5]

break.up is a book I should have liked. It had all the makings of something that would excite me - I LOVE DICKian premise, meditations on desire, Ernaux levels of wistful longing and lingering, the semiotext(e) seal of approval - but there was just. no. chemistry. Still trying to figure out why. Maybe I was offput by the philosophy quotes dropped like accents on the side of the pages? Might have been more impactful to work in a few philosophical threads instead of allowing in the echoes of so many other people.
There are some really great sentences in this book, and I was constantly underlining. But the reading experience felt disorienting and long for some reason ... Which I could almost appreciate as a device mimicking the drawn out pain of a break up and longing, but ultimately found kind of tedious. Idk.

[David Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Low on incident, high on everything else that might fill a novel, Break.up is the sort of book that will be read by tiny increments or all at once.

I read it slowly, falteringly, enjoying its depiction of distant desire, its attempts to eulogise a relationship that never quite dissolved into sex. Throughout it all, I was puzzled by the way it was achieving its effects.

It all comes into focus in the end. Beleaguered as Walsh's novel is with interruptions, stray thoughts, roads to elsewhere and reminders of the impossibility of remaking the world with words, it still manages to convince you that it's collapsing the barriers between reading, writing and being on a page-by-page basis.

[Josh Sherman · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was frustrating, because parts of it — the straightforward travelogue elements, the descriptions of places and people — I really enjoyed, but some of the language grated on me. Stuff like "beauty is in the eye of the beer-holder" and "Husband. Hus-band. A band, a tie, rubbery, elastic." and a play on the "dom" in "boredom," etc.

Still a lot better than most books, I guess, and worth checking out if you're an "autofiction" obsessive, probably.

[Robin]

Totally thought this was a memoir. Very literary/scholarly—I found the quotations throughout distracting. I think it's doing something, but I wasn't interested enough to determine what. Maybe if I was heartbroken...

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have ever been infatuated with someone who you never really had in the first place, yeah this will hit hard. It was the right book at the right time. The style is a bit different but fits modern times.

[Ameera Castro · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this book on a stroll after a break up, decided to finish it after healing from said break up.Immediately realised I made a mistake, I was mesmerized by it during my emotional turmoil but after recovery (maybe me own biases) just found it cheesier than cheddar.

[Eke · Rating 2 out of 5]

*1.5/5 stars.

y'all ever wanna tell a narrator to shut the fuck up? i couldn't stand her narrative, what a shame. beautifully written but so annoying.

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

dear writer i just gave up.

scrolled through some of it for school. will be asking my lecturer why we had this book in our syllabus.