The Capilano Review Reads and Rereads Lisa Robertson's The Baudelaire Fractal

Don't miss Ted Byrne's review of Lisa Robertson's The Baudelaire Fractal (Coach House), which appeared at the end of November for The Capilano Review's Long-Form section. TCR is, of course, based in Robertson's old stomping ground of Vancouver; and Byrne does relate the new work to the book she composed there. "[The Baudelaire Fractal], at times, brings forward the prosed automatism of Seven Walks  … and the occasional écritsurlart issued by The Office for Soft Architecture," he writes. More:

…[L]ooking at Nilling again, I realized that The Baudelaire Fractal could also be read as a series of essays. Reading it a second time, I found myself retitling the sections with topical headings, so I could try each one out as an essay: Painting, Rooms, Sex, Bleeding, Tailoring, and so on. But the topics are multiple within each section, and they refract back and forth across sections, so that in the end they elude that kind of labelling. It would have been smarter on my part to concentrate on the titles as they are given, allowing them their slippage, and then to read each section with the title hovering over my attention: “Windows,” “Anywhere Out of the World,” “Vocations,” “Twilight,” “Drunk”…

It also became clear that the apparent central conceit of the novel—the assumption of the Baudelairean authorship, the protagonist awakening in a hotel room to find herself the author of everything Baudelaire ever wrote, as promised on the back cover—was not fulfilled in the way that a novel typically delivers on its publicity. During my second reading, I made the following note regarding this event:

It happens, it is mentioned from time to time, but it is not the plot. It is a figure of reading. It is the topic of the section called “Which is Real?”

My third reading, engaging in a third hypothesis, re-examined the extent of Baudelaire’s presence in the text, testing the ways in which it may have eluded me, like the purloined letter. As it turned out, of course, there was no failed promise at all—Baudelaire is a constant presence in the book, which can’t be read fully without this subtle knowledge, like the author’s own subtle knowledge of her responsibility for his works. But I was right to note that it’s not the plot, not the letter, but rather the envelope.

The full review is at The Capilano Review.