The Baudelaire Fractal by Lisa Robertson

The Baudelaire Fractal by Lisa Robertson
Coach House Books, January 2020

A feminist, philosophical novel about gender and creativity.

Poet Lisa Robertson's first novel is a tour-de-force that's hard to describe. It's semi-autobiographical and reads like a memoir, looking back on the travels of her stand-in, Hazel Brown, as a young Canadian in France, right through into present-day middle age. It also takes the form of an academic essay in the fields of cultural and gender studies. Sometimes I understand exactly what is meant, other times I feel on the edge of understanding, rereading passages to grasp their meaning. Robertson's prose is arresting, both for her tantalizing ideas and her vivid descriptions.

        This morning I'm at the round table under the linden tree, in a sweet green helmet of buzzing. Each of its pendulous flowers seems to be inhabited by a bee. They don't mind me -- they're rapturously sucking nectar. I'm at the core of a breezy chandelier of honey.

The central premise is that Hazel Brown wakes up one morning with the realization that she has become the author of the writings of Charles Baudelaire, slipping into them "as one slips into a jacket."

        I simply discovered within myself late one morning in middle age the authorship of all of Baudelaire's work. I can scarcely communicate the shock of the realization. 

The male perspective of Baudelaire and other creatives is troubling to Hazel. Women as individuals are erased and objectified. Baudelaire did this with his longtime companion, a black woman named Jeanne Duval.

        Baudelaire scorned Jeanne Duval and every female he dallied with, or at least did so on paper, Ted Hughes scorned Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound scorned Djuna Barnes, George Baker scorned Elizabeth Smart, everybody scorned Jean Rhys. Proust did not scorn Albertine because Albertine was a man. The she-poets perished beneath the burden of beauty and scorn. This is what I observed.

Hazel's observations include the potentiality of fashion for its role in self-reinvention or the expression of personas.

        I found a tailored black mid-nineteenth-century gentleman's jacket at a flea market at Bastille. I suppose it would be called a frock coat, or perhaps a morning jacket. Its fitted sleeves were mounted quite high on the torso, its shoulders were softly rounded in an unfamiliar manner, and slipping it on I felt a freshened awareness of the articulations and expressions of my arms. I longed for a decorative walking stick. From a slightly accented waist its longish skirt flared a bit behind, encouraging a brisk, decorative enunciation of my step; this jacket added a grain of wit to its wearer's walk, like a mild sartorial drug.

Tangential musings develop subtle notions about the creative process and being a writer who is also a woman. Perhaps creation is more an aspect of becoming, rather than being. Meanwhile, I found it easy to identify with the concrete storyline, that of Hazel's travels and self-education through experience, through following her own desires, and learning to ignore the disregard of men.

I predicted The Baudelaire Fractal would be on the official Giller longlist, but it wasn't. It's not a book that will appeal to everyone, but for readers like me, it's intellectual dynamite.

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This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I have been reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.