Publishers Weekly
11/25/2019
Poet Robertson’s debut novel (after the poetry collection 3 Summers) is a heady, meditative look at art, the self, and the complex relationship between the two. Hazel Brown, a poet, wakes up one morning “to discover that I have written the complete works of Baudelaire.” This confounding and impossible occurrence, though, is no more amazing to the narrator “than it was for me to have become a poet, me, a girl, in 1984.” The novel eschews conventional plot, instead investigating the narrator’s development as a person and poet filtered through examinations of Baudelaire’s life, work, and milieu, especially the mistreated and forgotten women. The prose oscillates between Hazel’s scrutiny of her younger self—living in Paris, clumsily beginning to write, having sex—and contemplations of, for instance, the erasure of Baudelaire’s mistress Jeanne Duval from a painting by Gustave Courbet. As for the authorship of Baudelaire’s work, Hazel notes that there wasn’t any “tiresome striving after it on my part,” implying that rather it was something imposed on her, just as the legacy of male-centric histories are imposed on women. That Hazel became a poet true to her own voice, that she wasn’t erased or overlooked because of her gender, or because men treat women like “a concept,” is for the narrator the more unlikely event. 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. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
"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." – Stephen Finucan, Quill & Quire
"Robertson’s work offers a philosophical defence of the girl, a celebration of the menopausal dandy, a speculative release from the constraints of gender, and a portrait of reading as drifting." – Andrea Brady, London Review of Books
"Things happen in the novel but none so much as the sentences themselves, they are the events; each sentence invites mediation, pause, excitement." – Allison Grimaldi Donahue, BOMB Magazine
"It’s brilliant, strange, and unlike anything I’ve read before." – Rebecca Hussey, BOOKRIOT
"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." – Publishers Weekly
"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." – Jennifer Krasinski, Bookforum
"A new Lisa Robertson book is both a public event and a private kind of bacchanal." – Los Angeles Review of Books
"An intense if abstract portrait of the poet as a young woman in search of a kind of language that might lead to liberation." – The Kirkus Reviews
"As far as I’m concerned, it’s already a classic." – Anne Boyer
"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." – The Globe and Mail
"Robertson, one of Canada’s best and most innovative authors, thus cleaves close to Baudelaire’s own dictum: "Always be a poet, even in prose." – Winnipeg Free Press
"The Baudelaire Fractal is a book readers—certainly this reader—will continue returning to for its hypnotic narrative architecture, its portrayal of female ambition and courage, and its inner flint of artistic permission." – The Puritan
"The fabric of The Baudelaire Fractal—and it is most definitely a fabric, not just text but textile—is no less yours because it was thrifted. Learn to live in it. You won’t regret it, despite the lingering scent of shed self." – Newfound
"The overall effect is an augmented complexity, unrelated to progress, expansion or growth, in our understanding of artistic lineage, history and subjectivity itself." – MAP Magazine
"The Baudelaire Fractal doesn’t resemble a novel in most of its traditional senses, though the classification doesn’t really matter. Robertson bends the form to her will, and the result is captivating even as it tends towards abstraction." – Entropy Magazine
"A semi-autobiographical novel that blends elements of fiction, poetry, and cultural criticism, The Baudelaire Fractal explores what it means to be an author and a figure of authority, as well as how the Western literary canon and preconceptions about gender can limit who is recognized as a writer by society at large." – PRISM International
"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." – Music & Literature
"I want to spend many hours tracing the rapture of this book, as well as its seductions." – Spam Zine
"Everything becomes a form of writing, a code. Like the dispersed 'I' of the 'girl,' writing itself is both absent and multiplex, 'lost and grotesquely multiple'." – Cleveland Review of Books
"Above all, however, this book is governed by a poetic. The more you pursue it, the more you will find it to be unreadable, which is to say inexhaustible." – The Capilano Review
Kirkus Reviews
2019-12-09
An itinerant poet makes an autofiction of her wayward wandering youth in this debut novel.
One morning in the spring of 2016, the poet Hazel Brown awakens in a Vancouver hotel to discover that she's written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. Although "perhaps it is more precise to say that all at once, unbidden, I received the Baudelairean authorship, or that I found it within myself." Already middle-aged at the time of this curious inheritance, the poet attempts to trace the contours of this bequest through a kind of fragmented, allusive double biography: both of Baudelaire brooding amid the onset of industrial modernity and of her young self, coasting through Paris, the city Baudelaire left behind, more than a hundred years in his wake. Throughout the book—part Künstlerroman, part biography, part artist's statement, part political tract—we track Baudelaire's bourgeois dispossession, his revolutionary and then reactionary politics, his love, his losses, his furniture, his friendships. All this interpenetrates with the loose and jumbled story of Hazel's artistic awakening as she spins a set of concepts (the hotel room, the stain, the garment) into a tapestry of memory and desire. Through Hazel, poet Robertson (3 Summers, 2016, etc.) meditates on the impossibility of any coherent "I"—especially that of a woman writing poetry. But as Hazel reads philosophy and cleans apartments and seduces men and writes in her diary, she grows into herself, in glimmering, beautiful sentences that illuminate as much as they obscure: "First, I knew nothing, then I believed anything, now I doubt everything."
An intense if abstract portrait of the poet as a young woman in search of a kind of language that might lead to liberation.
