The Baudelaire Fractal
by Lisa Robertson
(Coach House Books, Jan. 2020)
Reviewed by Louis Klee
LISA ROBERTSON’S THE BAUDELAIRE FRACTAL
In a late essay on Machado de Assis’ The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1880), Susan Sontag sketches a tradition of digressive, loquacious prose fiction running from Laurence Sterne to Samuel Beckett—a way of writing in which we repeatedly meet “in different guises the chatty, meandering, compulsively speculative, eccentric narrator: reclusive (by choice or by vocation); prone to futile obsessions and fanciful theories and comically designed efforts of the will; often an autodidact; not quite a crank.” At the end of this catalog, Sontag adds that this narrator is “invariably male,” and there opens a long, and I think striking, aside: “(No woman is likely to get even the conditional sympathy these ragingly self-absorbed narrators claim from us, because of expectations that women be more sympathetic, and sympathizing, than men; a woman with the same degree of mental acuity and emotional separateness would be regarded as simply a monster.)”
