Reviews tagging 'Murder'

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

2 reviews

steveatwaywords's review

Go to review page

challenging emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

Nelson's "autotheory" memoir has already been praised by many, so I will echo the analysis: this is a remarkably intimate and scholarly work, synthesizing subjects often avoided and even cautioned against. Progressive and stark, Nelson takes on a tour of her dynamic and at times uncertain domestic life--her partner's transition, her own sexuality, the death of a parent, the murder of a sister, the entangling estrangement of pregnancy and child-rearing--and twines it with the threads of literary and gender theory: Sedgwick, Butler, Lacan, Foucault, Lambert, Wittig, Carson, Winnicott, and a host of others. The result is evocative, explicit, inspiring, reverential, and sobering.

This book is not easily navigable. While written in fragmentary pieces, the narrative is delivered in its entirety, a submersion of its whole, and one wonders at its turnings. Nelson writes while on a subway, at a cafe, surrounded by tumult, but what she offers is insular and contained, a cerebral dissection of her own life and how words, language, people shift. Derrida remarked that he wondered most about the sex lives of philosophers. Nelson has here made a powerful bridge (more a marriage) between the abstraction of teleology and the workings of body.

Expand filter menu Content Warnings

aliciae08's review against another edition

Go to review page

reflective medium-paced

3.0

I don’t know how to articulate my thoughts on this book. I know what I read, but if I were asked to describe this to someone, I just wouldn’t be able to.

It both reads like someone’s journal—scattered, but with the central theme hidden inside; and it also reads like someone’s xotero—their notes on articles that moved them just enough to be considered for a dissertation.

I didn’t love this book, but I definitely didn’t hate it either. It’s solidly a 3 for me. Sometimes the writing was pretentious and the sentences convoluted, but other times they were clear. Nelson talks honestly about motherhood and birthing, what her relationship looks like to her with a gender fluid partner and how their life is made up with all it’s mess, all it’s grief/fear and all it’s love. 

Expand filter menu Content Warnings
More...