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A review by armandulac
After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
5.0
I really, truly loved this book. I took a longer time reading this book, and honestly could have binged it and finished it sooner, but I wanted to savor my time with the writing style and historical sapphic figures (kind of like a fine wine).
One of my favorite aspects of this novel was the writing style. This story is told in "cascading vignettes" that focus on different women, political topics, Sappho fragments, queer men, and whatever else is relevant to the narrative. This does tend to make keeping track of the characters and the general plot more difficult, but I did get used to it after time (these are fictionalized historical women so I'm referring to them as characters). In the end, I found the writing style to be beautiful and one of my favorite parts of this book.
As someone who became comfortable calling myself a lesbian through discovering Sappho, and as someone with a literal Oscar Wilde shrine(?), this book really touched something deep inside me. Reading about this vast community of historical lesbians who studied Sappho was really important to me, and I hope all queer people read this book, find something interesting to love, and learn more about queer history.
One of my favorite aspects of this novel was the writing style. This story is told in "cascading vignettes" that focus on different women, political topics, Sappho fragments, queer men, and whatever else is relevant to the narrative. This does tend to make keeping track of the characters and the general plot more difficult, but I did get used to it after time (these are fictionalized historical women so I'm referring to them as characters). In the end, I found the writing style to be beautiful and one of my favorite parts of this book.
As someone who became comfortable calling myself a lesbian through discovering Sappho, and as someone with a literal Oscar Wilde shrine(?), this book really touched something deep inside me. Reading about this vast community of historical lesbians who studied Sappho was really important to me, and I hope all queer people read this book, find something interesting to love, and learn more about queer history.