Strange governesses
And the moral of that story is that without observation, we cease to exist.
Hello! Welcome to my latest experiment in bookish communication. You probably already get too many emails, so I’ll try to keep these short and snappy.
READ LATELY 12/8/2022
Jean Fremont’s NOW, NOW, LOUISON: A peculiar, breathtakingly audacious "biography" of Louise Bourgeois is written in the second person, so it feels like you are eavesdropping in her mind as imagined by the author, Jean Fremon. He knew her for decades and waited for her to die to publish it. In the afterword, he explains that by inhabiting her head and her voice, assembling pieces of her conjectured thought and actual work, he has created something akin to an act of portraiture, not biography. This called to mind Celia Paul's remarkable accounts of being Lucian Freud’s subject and how uncomfortable + mortifying that process is—what a thing to do to a friend.
Anne Serre's THE GOVERNESSES: Strange and sexy, this short, surreal quasi-fable follows three Maenad-like governesses at a French country house sometime in the early 20th century, cheerily tracing the somewhat sinister and unstable currents of power generated by their uninhibited presence on all of the people in their orbit, but most particularly a neighbor with a spyglass.
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's A TREATISE ON STARS: A collection of poetry seemingly from the mind of a radically empathic quantum physicist open to believing in extraterrestrial intelligence. Baffling, beautiful, worth re-reading and requiring re-reading, I think, to absorb the scope. I found it both elating but also mildly terrifying, probably because the ways people are choosing to construct their realities these days are not exactly wholesome.
Elspeth Barker's O CALEDONIA: Good lord! This was marvelous. The only novel Barker wrote (it was published when she was 51) and an absolute banger, full of the kind of language that reveals the gap between what is commonly considered beautiful writing and true sublimity. I've read a fair number of rave reviews of this book, and they have all managed to undersell it (a true mark of greatness when work cannot be encapsulated in breathy blurbiage, like calling Moby Dick a book about a whale). I find it amusing that many reviews hit the note that it was her only novel, but why bother writing more than one if you can write one absolutely perfect one? Here, Barker relates the story of Janet’s brief life, a life shaped by place and misunderstanding and circumstance, as she grows up in a world of squalid privilege in mid-century Scotland. The feeling for nature is extraordinary, as is the depiction of the ways that innocence can be misconstrued and misunderstood, and how difficult it is to be a self that does not fit in the expected ways.
Currently reading: Percival Everett, DR.NO
Bookmarking: Poems of Death; Anemones—A Simone Weil Project; The Lichen Museum
Blogging: gift guides
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Image: 3 Terracotta female figures, ca. 1400–1300 BCE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access Collection.