The Baudelaire Fractal

Synopsis

One morning, poet Hazel Brown wakes in a badly decorated hotel room with the startling realization that she has somehow written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. The discovery sends her drifting through memories of cheap rooms, cities, clothing, books, and the years she spent becoming a writer. Moving between London, Vancouver, Paris, and the French countryside, Hazel considers the obsessions she shares with Baudelaire: modernity, poverty, beauty, art, and the construction of a self.

The Baudelaire Fractal is Lisa Robertson’s singular first novel, blurring fiction, memoir, literary criticism, and art writing. Playful and intellectually restless, it turns everything from nineteenth-century painting to the perfect jacket into material for thinking about authorship and desire. At its centre is the figure of the “she-dandy,” through whom Robertson reimagines the traditionally male mythology of the artist and asks what it means for a woman to invent a literary life of her own.

About the Author

Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet, essayist, novelist, and art writer. A longtime resident of Vancouver and an important figure in its experimental writing and arts communities, she has published numerous books of poetry and essays, including The Weather, The Men, Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip, and 3 Summers. Her work moves between poetry, philosophy, art, architecture, and cultural criticism. Robertson has taught internationally and received the inaugural C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She lives in France.

Publisher

Coach House Books

Publication Date

February 4, 2020

Format

Paperback

Pages

208

Subjects

Literary Fiction · Experimental Fiction · Feminist Fiction · Art & Literature · Canadian Literature

ISBN

9781552453902