Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

THE BAUDELAIRE FRACTAL

Lisa Robertson

One morning, the poet Hazel Brown wakes up in a strange hotel room to find that she's written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire.

Surprising as this may be, it's no more surprising to Brown than the impossible journey she's taken to become the writer that she is. Animated by the spirit of the poète maudit, she shuttles between London, Vancouver, Paris, and the French countryside, moving fluidly between the early 1980s and the present, from rented room to rented room, all the while considering such Baudelaireian obsessions as modernity, poverty, and the perfect jacket...

Part memoir, part magical realism, part hilarious trash-talking take on contemporary art and the poet's life, The Baudelaire Fractal is the long-awaited debut novel by the inimitable Lisa Robertson.

LiSA ROBERTSON is a Canadian poet and essayist living in France. Her books include The Weather, The Men, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, and 3 Summers. in 2018 she was awarded the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry, and she has received the Gertrude Stein Award for innovative poetry in English. She has taught at Cambridge, Princeton, UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, Piet Zwart institute, Naropa's jack Ker- ouac School of Disembodied Poetics and the American University of Paris.

Available products
Book Published 2020-01-01 by Coach House Books - Toronto (CA)
Book Published 2020-01-01 by Coach House Books

Comments

Robertson, with feminist wit, a dash of kink, and a generous brain, has written an urtext that tenders there can be, in fact, or in fiction, no such thing. Hers is a boon for readers and writers, now and in the future.

Short-listed, Governor General's Literary Award Fiction 2020

Things happen in the novel but none so much as the sentences themselves, they are the events; each sentence invites mediation, pause, excitement.

This is a novel that, though its means are singular, will open and salvage possible worlds - above all, for writers, who perhaps will one day look back at their younger selves with an air of indulgence and find they were reading Lisa Robertson.

Often reading a novel, even a good novel, feels like falling into a well-worn groove. There can be comfort in that. This is a different thing entirely. Ironic for a book that works by repetition: The Baudelaire Fractal is a novel you haven't read before.

It's brilliant, strange, and unlike anything I've read before.

An intense if abstract portrait of the poet as a young woman in search of a kind of language that might lead to liberation.

And perhaps that's what Robertson, with this demanding, erudite, and quite remarkable novel, is telling us is required to return those who have been expunged from the pages of literature: time and effort.

As far as I'm concerned, it's already a classic.

A difficult work of ideas, by turns enlightening and arcane, part autobiographical narrative, part literary theory, Robertson's debut novel, for those interested in possibilities of fiction, is not to be missed.