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Marginalanteckningar
På samma sätt som i den mäktiga Motberättelser (2018) skriver John Keene i debutboken Marginalanteckningar i skuggan av Den stora berättelsen om Amerika. Det är på frånsidan, i marginalerna, som denna uppväxtskildring tar gestalt. På en tät, mättad prosa berättar Keene om en barndom i St Louis, under en tid när medborgarrättsrörelsen växer och Vietnamkriget pågår. En känslig pojke upptäcker världen och blir varse vilken del av den som han har tillträde till och var det är farligt att röra sig. I hemkvarteret pågår livet med familjen, släktingar, kyrkfolk, Vietnamveteraner, hallickar, gatufestivaler och ibland skottlossning. Ögonblickets detaljer lyser upp historiens mörker.
94 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1995
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764 people want to read
About the author
John Keene
6 books156 followersJohn Keene is the author of the novel Annotations (New Directions); the poetry collection Seismosis (1913 Press), an art-text collaboration with artist Christopher Stackhouse; the short fiction collection Counternarratives, published in 2015 by New Directions; and the poetry collection Punks: New & Selected Poems, published in 2021 by The Song Cave. His translation of Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat Books) appeared in 2014. His stories, poems, essays, and translations have appeared in a wide array of periodicals and anthologies, including most recently Vice, TriQuarterly, The Offing, and Boundary. An artist as well, he has exhibited his work in New York and Berlin, and teaches at Rutgers University-Newark.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
December 14, 2014
Beautiful. Angry. Terribly sad.
Some reviewers seem to have struggled with the fact that the prose here is not what they would expect from a "Black man" - when stated this boldly, the racism is obvious. When couched in the language of the Academy it is much less so.
The sentences here are condensed, are worn down by hard-thought and tough craft into crystalline perfection. They have power. There is jazz to them too, explicitly so (we have many references to jazz tunes and riffs and legendary figures) and in their form and rhythm. There is a touch of Modernism here too, and the compressed nature of the poetic line.
It is a remembered childhood, riven with issues of race and sexuality and gender, riven with the legacy of miss-used power.
It is short too - only take a couple 'a hours of your time - and New Directions deserve your support as a publishing house - so I really can see no reason for you not to give him a listen. You may not love it, but his voice deserves your attention.
Some reviewers seem to have struggled with the fact that the prose here is not what they would expect from a "Black man" - when stated this boldly, the racism is obvious. When couched in the language of the Academy it is much less so.
The sentences here are condensed, are worn down by hard-thought and tough craft into crystalline perfection. They have power. There is jazz to them too, explicitly so (we have many references to jazz tunes and riffs and legendary figures) and in their form and rhythm. There is a touch of Modernism here too, and the compressed nature of the poetic line.
It is a remembered childhood, riven with issues of race and sexuality and gender, riven with the legacy of miss-used power.
It is short too - only take a couple 'a hours of your time - and New Directions deserve your support as a publishing house - so I really can see no reason for you not to give him a listen. You may not love it, but his voice deserves your attention.
January 28, 2022
"Loneliness is solitude unfulfilled by its own presence."
A wonderful, sweet, short and difficult book. A collection of recollections from a childhood lived in St. Louis, Missouri, as witnessed by a Black queer child. The history of the town, its urban and suburban life, its geography, and its people all merge brilliantly in the observations of an adult who was once a precocious artful child.
The difficulty of the book has more to do with its form than anything else. Its style and language are clearly meant to be academic, complete with references and notes, which I found unusual and was new to me in a non-academic setting. It's difficult to categorize what this book is, how autobiographical it is, as well as how much is fictionalized. Also interesting in form is how memory here is jumbled, chaotic I would even say, and not sequential. As stated in the book itself: "Certain sensations are unrenderable in sequential terms." One memory does not lead to another but instead it's multiple memories all working to form a polyptych of a narrative.
Some of the other quotes I loved from the book:
"Love, therefore, assumes the status of a cynosure, when in truth it is but one outward manifestation of the internal discourse of returning."
"Simply naming, while powerful, never proves enough."
"The desire to be seen was an attempt to escape alterity, or in other words, to shift from the margins to the center."
"Sex, that sublime sum of bodily attraction, served as little more than one factor in the algebra of their juncture."
"Civility offers an acceptable way to evade the issues at hand."
A wonderful, sweet, short and difficult book. A collection of recollections from a childhood lived in St. Louis, Missouri, as witnessed by a Black queer child. The history of the town, its urban and suburban life, its geography, and its people all merge brilliantly in the observations of an adult who was once a precocious artful child.
The difficulty of the book has more to do with its form than anything else. Its style and language are clearly meant to be academic, complete with references and notes, which I found unusual and was new to me in a non-academic setting. It's difficult to categorize what this book is, how autobiographical it is, as well as how much is fictionalized. Also interesting in form is how memory here is jumbled, chaotic I would even say, and not sequential. As stated in the book itself: "Certain sensations are unrenderable in sequential terms." One memory does not lead to another but instead it's multiple memories all working to form a polyptych of a narrative.
Some of the other quotes I loved from the book:
"Love, therefore, assumes the status of a cynosure, when in truth it is but one outward manifestation of the internal discourse of returning."
"Simply naming, while powerful, never proves enough."
"The desire to be seen was an attempt to escape alterity, or in other words, to shift from the margins to the center."
"Sex, that sublime sum of bodily attraction, served as little more than one factor in the algebra of their juncture."
"Civility offers an acceptable way to evade the issues at hand."
October 31, 2017
Holinka turned me onto Keene and, shit howdy, was I impressed. This is phantasmal writing; conjuring long-dead spirits of youthful pain. Keene's sexual-preferences are handled in a painfully imagistic fashion, and just stop your heart when you realize the levels of subjugation that take place within the subjugated. Reads like a dream-mantra, repetition and cadence being central. But that chapter at the dance; fuck, that's a heartbreaker.
November 30, 2023
I recently re-read Jean Toomer’s CANE and found it every bit as mesmerizing and mystical as when I first read it about 15 years ago. Then I came across John Keene’s Annotations which has a description that likens it to CANE. I read Keene’s Counternarratives a few years back and found it be challenging and deep and something I’d want to come back to, so I dove right into this one.
The book is a kind of free jazz reflection on a youth in St. Louis in the ‘70s and ‘80s, growing up black in urban and suburban settings with the added complication of being gay. Each chapter sort of centers around a single moment or event in life but manages to capture a whole vision of everything going on at the macro-social level with an economy of language that is marveling. There is a density to the prose and the style is highly idiosyncratic where titles of (mostly jazz) compositions appear randomly in the text. The nods to jazz and the free prose style make the writing as much about the subject of the sentences as it is to their syntactical construction. At times it can be pretty challenging to sort out what exactly is being communicated, but even in these moments, the musicality of the writing carries you through.
As for the links to CANE, I don’t see them. Maybe I’m thinking too literally about that book’s form and content, but I just don’t really get much of a sense beyond the fact that Toomer’s narrative tries to give a glimpse of life in the Jim Crow South while Annotations gives a glimpse of life in St. Louis in the ‘70s. A tenuous connection, I would say, especially given how autobiography-qua-fiction Keene’s book feels while Toomer’s rotates through a series of characters.
I think I enjoyed Counternarratives a bit more than this, but Keene’s writing is immediate and fresh and really something special. I haven’t read his poetry yet, but I hope to see more fiction from him in the future—a unique voice that I think is woefully underappreciated and underread.
The book is a kind of free jazz reflection on a youth in St. Louis in the ‘70s and ‘80s, growing up black in urban and suburban settings with the added complication of being gay. Each chapter sort of centers around a single moment or event in life but manages to capture a whole vision of everything going on at the macro-social level with an economy of language that is marveling. There is a density to the prose and the style is highly idiosyncratic where titles of (mostly jazz) compositions appear randomly in the text. The nods to jazz and the free prose style make the writing as much about the subject of the sentences as it is to their syntactical construction. At times it can be pretty challenging to sort out what exactly is being communicated, but even in these moments, the musicality of the writing carries you through.
As for the links to CANE, I don’t see them. Maybe I’m thinking too literally about that book’s form and content, but I just don’t really get much of a sense beyond the fact that Toomer’s narrative tries to give a glimpse of life in the Jim Crow South while Annotations gives a glimpse of life in St. Louis in the ‘70s. A tenuous connection, I would say, especially given how autobiography-qua-fiction Keene’s book feels while Toomer’s rotates through a series of characters.
I think I enjoyed Counternarratives a bit more than this, but Keene’s writing is immediate and fresh and really something special. I haven’t read his poetry yet, but I hope to see more fiction from him in the future—a unique voice that I think is woefully underappreciated and underread.
September 17, 2013
Melancholy and beautiful, this work is jazz and blues in poetic prose. It shifts constantly between the interior and exterior dialogues without missing a step, weaving a rich tapestry of the experiences of the narrator in song-like verse.
July 3, 2019
kinda had a religious mythical experience reading this. a dreambook of memories of growing up as a black boy in St. Louis, Missouri ~ in a genre that duplicates the collage of a city so layered with the past. i have been writing about St. Louis (my love, my home) trying so hard to recreate the feeling of this place, and this is the first time i've read anything that mirrors the experience of midwestern childhood and failed industrial landscape. i also read this book while staying at a friend's house on south broadway st, right off the buggy mississippi river, "blue barge of our sympathies, float past this scene of woe." placing old stained memories into a "novel" of short chapters is genius. i'm so inspired by this book and validated that St. Louis is a literary goldmine, a world worth writing about ~ "an amalgam of nearly every American region." i also just really enjoyed john keene's point of view and philosophical poetic thoughts and how he textures the visual, remembered life: "Memory, that vast orchard of myriad, variegated moments, appears to undergo an endless replanting. In the summer the heat would troll across the city like an immense seine, gathering every living and inanimate thing in its folds. This entails no notion of the "subject."" need 2 put to words how it feels to navigate this historical, brick house "lacework of street", "a function of repetition, or so the very patterns of your life have led you to believe."
May 28, 2019
A few notes and a quotation: I met John Keene in 2017, who was so generous with his time and patient with a fellow missourian's grad-student talkativeness.
This is a desert island book. I no longer need to search for the form inside myself that would complete the expression of my memories of home. I'm no longer able to envision myself writing the "My Life" of Missouri, because Keene already did, in 1995.
"Missouri, being an amalgam of nearly ever American region, presents the poet with a particularly useful analogue for an articulation of the 'American,' though close inspection shows a sum less metaphorically potent than its metonymically dissoluble parts."
This is a desert island book. I no longer need to search for the form inside myself that would complete the expression of my memories of home. I'm no longer able to envision myself writing the "My Life" of Missouri, because Keene already did, in 1995.
"Missouri, being an amalgam of nearly ever American region, presents the poet with a particularly useful analogue for an articulation of the 'American,' though close inspection shows a sum less metaphorically potent than its metonymically dissoluble parts."
April 3, 2017
A few lines I wrote down from Annotations:
Desire is, among other things, a function of repetition, or so the very patterns of your life have led you to believe.
Brief observation of any personality proves that human existence cannot be reduced to science.
To speak of culture is to foreshadow a battle.
As a result those endlessly engaged in the quest for happiness, usually constitute the unhappiest lot.
Their theories to explain all manner of matter, though no theory to explain this thirst for theories.
.
Desire is, among other things, a function of repetition, or so the very patterns of your life have led you to believe.
Brief observation of any personality proves that human existence cannot be reduced to science.
To speak of culture is to foreshadow a battle.
As a result those endlessly engaged in the quest for happiness, usually constitute the unhappiest lot.
Their theories to explain all manner of matter, though no theory to explain this thirst for theories.
.
September 22, 2024
excellent, genius, new (to me) form of novella, highly recommend. digestible yet complex and formless. it’s a poem, it’s prose, it’s a song, it’s everything it wants to be at once and none of this at all because it is wholly unique.
a tender love letter — an ode to the complicated relationships between the places you love and grew up in that reciprocate back harshly or not at all.
a tender love letter — an ode to the complicated relationships between the places you love and grew up in that reciprocate back harshly or not at all.
May 11, 2025
John Keene is so talented. Even here in his late twenties he just burns with pure language. A lot of this was over my head, though I read it in a few sittings across a single day and loved occasional sentences so much I read them again aloud. I could only piece together vaguely what was happening but didn’t mind. We’re lucky to have him. Counternarratives is a masterpiece.
May 1, 2022
A book that strives to capture something of the incoherence of life, and it succeeds to a certain extent, but I go to art for coherence. Life is incoherent enough for me. Thought not sufficiently apprehended sensuously.
August 19, 2023
this was... brilliant and challenging. it was a little like getting into a cold pool. at first a small shock, the slow easing in, finally warmer than getting out. some would say it has joyce-ian qualities but i found it much more comfortable than joyce. i think it's because of the book's beautiful poetry. the use of language, the cadence, it's incredible. there's not really a plot though it is vaguely autobiographical. keene also lets on that he knows exactly what he is doing. it's just the kind of novel a poet would write.
in a way - i do think this is what literature is supposed to be. it's a significant, important book. this is what autofiction ought to look like - you know, the same way a painted portrait is different from a photograph. there is something in abstraction that enables...
this is also a book about place. so many references to landmarks in st. louis; i was googling nonstop. also many references to jazz. i can't help but feel that the writing itself becomes the city; becomes jazz.
technically, really, this is a 5-star book. if i am still thinking about it next month, maybe i will give it 5 stars.
--
"Dim body, dazzling body. When the fun began it was frequently bedtime. Volubility unchecked in an imaginative child is a sure prescription for disaster. Although he tried to cloak these comments in a voiceless whisper, his voice dispersed the silence like a well-cast stone."
"One assessment: the chill cast the courts in a crepuscular light. Stan, who coached the older, lither players, sported a thick, beguiling mustache, while coiled hairs spilled from the V-neck of his jersey, leaving us with a sensation that we were yet unable to name."
"Upright in our afros like coxcombs brought dismay to the faces of our mothers, but how else could we boys display them so that the girls would not fail to see them. "Well, how do I look?" knowing that no one with any decency would answer. The desire to be seen was an attempt to escape alterity, or in other words, to shift from the margins to the center."
"Intuition provided the first step, information the second, until he realized that by combining the two he was creating a handy index of being."
"Ut natura poesis: autumn arrived to our wonderment, introduced by the river's murmur. Stands of birches, poplars, shuddered with delight, as the park glimmered with the embers of Indian summer. Carondelet."
"In Los Angeles and its environs, scale appeared to warp itself, for they drove and they drove and they drove some more, yet they still had not gotten there. What he noticed first were the palm trees hovering above, the heat's white shuddering at the horizon, the waves' soft churning as they lapped upon the shore, the sparkling mazes of the supermarkets."
"As you will recall she was a blond divorcee with two attractive kids, whom she appeared to love more dearly than she did the thought of them. Although working-class and Irish, they quickly ignited a friendship, which differed from what we had encountered in the city. Civility offers an acceptable way to evade the issues at hand. Name us anonymous."
""What will it take to get this garden growing?" a clarion to lift the rake and hoe, though th eresult would remain that patch of scrub that cumbered in the shade of the collapsing carport."
"You beseeched them but they belittled this as mere unmanliness, sure any empathy might blunt the sharpness of your sorrow. Listening implies a desire to surrender."
"If you're light, you're all right, if you're brown, hang around, if you're black, get back. There are some taboos best left unbroken. Ask me now. Such expansive lyricism might be worthy of reprobation were not the very phenomenon of our lives a boundless source of poetry."
"Your spirit, a small fluorescent candle, never cedes to any circumstance its gleaming."
"Thus his musings, when written down, gradually melded, gathered shape, solidified like a well-mixed mache, and thus, upon rereading them he realized what he had accomplished was the construction of an actual voice. The final dances of youth, dim incandescence. Willow weep for me."
in a way - i do think this is what literature is supposed to be. it's a significant, important book. this is what autofiction ought to look like - you know, the same way a painted portrait is different from a photograph. there is something in abstraction that enables...
this is also a book about place. so many references to landmarks in st. louis; i was googling nonstop. also many references to jazz. i can't help but feel that the writing itself becomes the city; becomes jazz.
technically, really, this is a 5-star book. if i am still thinking about it next month, maybe i will give it 5 stars.
--
"Dim body, dazzling body. When the fun began it was frequently bedtime. Volubility unchecked in an imaginative child is a sure prescription for disaster. Although he tried to cloak these comments in a voiceless whisper, his voice dispersed the silence like a well-cast stone."
"One assessment: the chill cast the courts in a crepuscular light. Stan, who coached the older, lither players, sported a thick, beguiling mustache, while coiled hairs spilled from the V-neck of his jersey, leaving us with a sensation that we were yet unable to name."
"Upright in our afros like coxcombs brought dismay to the faces of our mothers, but how else could we boys display them so that the girls would not fail to see them. "Well, how do I look?" knowing that no one with any decency would answer. The desire to be seen was an attempt to escape alterity, or in other words, to shift from the margins to the center."
"Intuition provided the first step, information the second, until he realized that by combining the two he was creating a handy index of being."
"Ut natura poesis: autumn arrived to our wonderment, introduced by the river's murmur. Stands of birches, poplars, shuddered with delight, as the park glimmered with the embers of Indian summer. Carondelet."
"In Los Angeles and its environs, scale appeared to warp itself, for they drove and they drove and they drove some more, yet they still had not gotten there. What he noticed first were the palm trees hovering above, the heat's white shuddering at the horizon, the waves' soft churning as they lapped upon the shore, the sparkling mazes of the supermarkets."
"As you will recall she was a blond divorcee with two attractive kids, whom she appeared to love more dearly than she did the thought of them. Although working-class and Irish, they quickly ignited a friendship, which differed from what we had encountered in the city. Civility offers an acceptable way to evade the issues at hand. Name us anonymous."
""What will it take to get this garden growing?" a clarion to lift the rake and hoe, though th eresult would remain that patch of scrub that cumbered in the shade of the collapsing carport."
"You beseeched them but they belittled this as mere unmanliness, sure any empathy might blunt the sharpness of your sorrow. Listening implies a desire to surrender."
"If you're light, you're all right, if you're brown, hang around, if you're black, get back. There are some taboos best left unbroken. Ask me now. Such expansive lyricism might be worthy of reprobation were not the very phenomenon of our lives a boundless source of poetry."
"Your spirit, a small fluorescent candle, never cedes to any circumstance its gleaming."
"Thus his musings, when written down, gradually melded, gathered shape, solidified like a well-mixed mache, and thus, upon rereading them he realized what he had accomplished was the construction of an actual voice. The final dances of youth, dim incandescence. Willow weep for me."
October 9, 2012
Couldn't finish this. It is imaginative and very carefully constructed, but the language is persistently old-fashioned. For example:[return][return]"Picnics swarmed those summers as fervidly as bees, though he feigned to ignore the insects unless they graced him with a sting."[return][return]Many times -- even many times on a single page -- it is unclear whether Keene is trying for a nostalgic, period-piece tone (he partly is) or whether his language is habitually high modernist and out of date (it often is). Here, "fervidly" is fusty and obtrusively poetic, and "feigned" is a stale word and an unpleasant alliteration. Or this passage:[return][return]"Ebony and Black Enterprise graced the marble coffee table, though Jet garnered everyone's initial review. Our generation possesses only a cursory sense of the world that our ancestors braved, though the burdens of history bear unmovably upon us."[return][return]At the beginning of these two sentences, it makes sense that the two magazines "grace" the table: that's old-fashioned, but it also sounds like a disaffected son's way of talking: after all, the coffee table is marble. And it might even be part of the satire that Jet "garnered" attention. But irony cannot be the reason why Keene's generation has only a "cursory" sense of history (who says "cursory" any more?), and if it's satire to say that his ancestors "braved" their world, then the point is lost in doubts about the author's voice. By the end, with the use of "upon" instead of "down on" or "onto," I lose confidence that I am reading a contemporary author.[return][return]Toward the end part of the reason for this dusty language becomes clear when Keene lists his favorite writers: "Joyce, Tagore, Faulkner, and Morrison." Tagore! Amazing! [return][return]The structure of the book, and its modernist ambitions, are clearly from early Joyce, Faulkner, and Morrison. I'll read another of his books, "Seismosis," to be sure of the difference between word choice and nostalgia.
May 9, 2017
Dense, erudite, allusive, John Keene’s Annotations (New Directions) eloquently engages numerous subjects, including desire, time, memory (“a vast orchard of myriad, variegated moments”), the body, the “fires of history,” language, love, sex (“that sublime sum of bodily attraction”), knowledge, religion, and the imagination. It’s a powerful Künstlerroman, marked by its compression, parataxis, point-of-view shifts, fracture, glosses on historical texts, and marvelous aperçus:
“Loneliness is solitude unfulfilled by its own presence.”
“Oppression is most effective when its aims are effected voluntarily.”
“Reality, that rude intruder.”
“Our dreams are but hulls for our souls.”
Additionally, there’s ongoing commentary about the art and artifice of narrative and of Annotations itself, the narrator concluding: “[T]hese remarks should be duly noted as a series of mere life-notes aspiring to the condition of annotations,” the text from which said “life-notes” are drawn not merely an open question but an ongoing one.
http://www.ndbooks.com/book/annotations/
“Loneliness is solitude unfulfilled by its own presence.”
“Oppression is most effective when its aims are effected voluntarily.”
“Reality, that rude intruder.”
“Our dreams are but hulls for our souls.”
Additionally, there’s ongoing commentary about the art and artifice of narrative and of Annotations itself, the narrator concluding: “[T]hese remarks should be duly noted as a series of mere life-notes aspiring to the condition of annotations,” the text from which said “life-notes” are drawn not merely an open question but an ongoing one.
http://www.ndbooks.com/book/annotations/
October 5, 2012
Although the author admits it blatantly, the pretentious inner voice is what gets to me. Despite the intense vocabulary used, the structure and flow of the story is absolutely unique and innovative. As an experimental novel/autobiography/poetry, whichever you may label it, it was successful in delivering Keene's ideals and thoughts on life and how it should be conveyed.
This was certainly a difficult read. I found myself constantly rereading; digesting each fruitful sentence of poetry and appreciating the structured underlying themes. However, I feel that such efforts from a reader could deter one. And deterrence isn't a wise tactic for any book in my opinion.
But, just as I've felt about Kafka, although it's difficult and I feel the need to be pulled through, I appreciate the message and enjoyed the novel overall. Only reason I rate it three stars was due to the frustrations of my first read-through.
This was certainly a difficult read. I found myself constantly rereading; digesting each fruitful sentence of poetry and appreciating the structured underlying themes. However, I feel that such efforts from a reader could deter one. And deterrence isn't a wise tactic for any book in my opinion.
But, just as I've felt about Kafka, although it's difficult and I feel the need to be pulled through, I appreciate the message and enjoyed the novel overall. Only reason I rate it three stars was due to the frustrations of my first read-through.
January 8, 2022
"Memory, that vast orchard of myriad, variegated moments, appears to undergo an endless replanting. In the summer the heat would troll across the city like an immense seine, gathering every living and inanimate thing in its folds. This entails no notion of the "subject." Being of Southern blood, nearly all of them could bear it, though not without some cavils and some grudging. Chatillon-DeMenil. Ardor, or another, made the man next door shoot his wife, though at the beginning there was little violence and still the white flight had begun. Contingency spells the death of certitude."
(p7-8)
(p7-8)
April 14, 2016
It took me a long time to read this as I digested it in small bits over time. While I think that was a suitable way of tackling it (it could definitely be considered a fairly difficult read), I would like to reread this one in one sitting and see how it changes for me.
Regardless, I owe it a second read.
Very interesting book. Not sure if I know how to talk about it just yet.
Regardless, I owe it a second read.
Very interesting book. Not sure if I know how to talk about it just yet.
October 12, 2015
engaged w/ it here: http://www.5cense.com/15/452.htm
August 16, 2017
Demands a great deal from the reader. Gorgeous, careful, totally worthwhile.
December 18, 2024
EXCELLENT BOOK...BUT hard to describe.
Let's say you took the first two novels in Proust's sequence *À la recherche du temps perdu* and then turned it into an erasure poem, lowering the word count by 90-95%, leaving some whole sentences, some phrases, sometimes a single word. Divide it into short chapters, somewhat on the lines of Lyn Hejinian's My Life. Then you might have similar to Annotations.
The Proust comparison came to mind because those first two volumes cover Proust's life from earliest memories up through the end of adolescence, which is about what Keene covers here. But Proust's novels also include a lot of local circumstance, a lot about his interests and education, and something of the context of the times, and so does Keene.
The thing is, though, that in Keene it is all radically compressed--the whole thing is about 80 pages. Even so, reading it, you get something of the complexity, density, and range of a full-on, door-stopper autobiographical novel.
Not to mention that Keene seems to be observing some kind of protocol or compositional restraint, like Hejinian. I couldn't figure out what it was, but there was a kind of procedural regularity to the book that I felt but could not detect.
Anyway, outstanding book. Keene has been getting some kudos lately (National Book Award, no less) but even so he deserves too be more widely known than he is.
Let's say you took the first two novels in Proust's sequence *À la recherche du temps perdu* and then turned it into an erasure poem, lowering the word count by 90-95%, leaving some whole sentences, some phrases, sometimes a single word. Divide it into short chapters, somewhat on the lines of Lyn Hejinian's My Life. Then you might have similar to Annotations.
The Proust comparison came to mind because those first two volumes cover Proust's life from earliest memories up through the end of adolescence, which is about what Keene covers here. But Proust's novels also include a lot of local circumstance, a lot about his interests and education, and something of the context of the times, and so does Keene.
The thing is, though, that in Keene it is all radically compressed--the whole thing is about 80 pages. Even so, reading it, you get something of the complexity, density, and range of a full-on, door-stopper autobiographical novel.
Not to mention that Keene seems to be observing some kind of protocol or compositional restraint, like Hejinian. I couldn't figure out what it was, but there was a kind of procedural regularity to the book that I felt but could not detect.
Anyway, outstanding book. Keene has been getting some kudos lately (National Book Award, no less) but even so he deserves too be more widely known than he is.
January 11, 2019
A collection of small, almost prose poem-like, vignettes of an African American boy's childhood and coming off she in St. Louis. The collection doesn't seem to go far enough. The vignettes are told with lyrical mastery, but it's unclear what we are supposed to be taking away from every chapter and it ends up coming out a bit flat with no real spark of insight.
Read
February 18, 2023"Desire is, among other things, a function of repetition, or so the very patterns of your life have led you to believe."
"Loneliness is solitude unfulfilled by its own presence."
"Though effective as an initial strategy, transgression devolves swiftly into an end in itself."
"Your memory is transformative as opposed to eidetic, which best serves the purpose of literature or lying."
"Loneliness is solitude unfulfilled by its own presence."
"Though effective as an initial strategy, transgression devolves swiftly into an end in itself."
"Your memory is transformative as opposed to eidetic, which best serves the purpose of literature or lying."
February 4, 2019
I liked the avant-garde format of this highly literary poetic prose book. The setting is St. Louis in the latter half of the 20th century. I especially enjoyed the sporadic references to pop culture and politics that framed several of the mini- chapters.
January 11, 2023
I'm too dumb to understand this kind of poetic language of fragmentary imagery and a kaleidoscopic language so although it was short and there were bits and pieces that stood out I didn't really appreciate it and can't really give a good judgement. Really interesting style though
December 31, 2019
To read this a few weeks after My Life was something I least expected. What a delightful book. Highly recommend
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November 20, 2022"Desire is, among other things, a function of repetition, or so the very patterns of your life have led you to believe."
September 19, 2023
Why isn't John Keene more widely read? This is a wildly associative ride through contextual fragments that allllmost make up half a memoir
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December 24, 2023I couldn’t rate this because I simply didn’t understand it. It definitely expanded my vocabulary and I’ll doing more research on the notes!
April 3, 2024
Okay upon having to read this I was kinda like eh but then after talking to him I'm literally so clinically obsessed with him he's such a cutie.
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