![]() I can recognize this as a symptom of teaching anxiety and sleep deprivation and intense reading. Early the following morning, I opened my copy of Baudelaire and had the totally uncanny experience that I had written the text I was reading. Lisa Robertson Hazel’s discovery is based on a strange reading experience I had.I was preparing to teach a class on the prose poem at the University of East Anglia, so I was up late at night rereading Paris Spleen in relation to Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau’s last text. Can you talk a bit about this idea, this notion of feeling as though you have authored someone else’s works? Early in the novel Hazel proclaims, “Reading unfolds like a game called ‘I,’ in public gardens in good weather, in a series of worn-down hotel rooms, in museums in winter, where ‘I’ is the composite figure who is going to write but hasn’t yet.” Robertson’s body of work has also explored this roving “I,” creating different voices, or even different writerly selves, for each book-favoring the multiple, polyphonic over the monolithic or absolute.Īllison Grimaldi Donahue Part of the premise of The Baudelaire Fractal is that Hazel Brown, the protagonist, wakes up one morning to realize she has written all of Baudelaire’s works. Things happen in the novel but none so much as the sentences themselves, they are the events each sentence invites mediation, pause, and excitement. Hazel Brown searches for her artistic identity through an affective form of reading and learning, taking pleasure in each thing she does, in movement separated from progress. The Baudelaire Fractal is the story of a young Canadian woman, Hazel Brown, who moves to Paris to become a writer.The prose itself enacts the meandering way in which a young writer is often formed, through mistakes, through culture, through sex. We sat down over coffee in the apartment she shares with her husband to discuss The Baudelaire Fractal, of course, but also the nineteenth century, the pleasures of reading, and the need for resistance and community in making work and in living life. But Robertson generously welcomed me into her life, inviting me to dinner with friends as well as to a performance of new translations. I flew to Paris during the ongoing national strike to find a tense, chaotic city. ![]() When I read The Baudelaire Fractal(Coach House Books), I knew I needed to talk to her fortunately, our mutual friend, artist Kathy Slade, was able to put us in touch. Her poetry and essays have been doors to possibility for my own writing. Lisa Robertson is a writer who explores complex ideas, serious philosophical thinking while keeping equal pace with feeling and beauty. ![]()
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